Public School Funding

The standard for publicly funded schools is based on a few different things. One of wich is the actual achievment acidemically of all students as a whole based on standardized tests for each year.

Does anyone see anything wrong with this? because ive heard allot of complaining

nothing wrong with standardized tests imo. Regardless of the school location, children all over this country in the same grade should be recieving the same level of education, one way to gauge this, would be the standarized tests.

My only problem with standardized tests is that is shouldn't be the sole basis for gauging the level of education being taught in our schools. I understand it can be stressful for our kids, especially if the test is used to promote them or graduate them from school, however I think kids need to understand this type of stress, since in life there are many instances in work and life in which stress and performance on a particular project will come into play. Teachers and schools should also have some sort of say on how well our children are learning. I know a few smart kids who just aren't good at taking tests and I know a certain knucklehead who aces every test but doesn't do well in class or with his assignments and homework. So while SAT's cannot take into consideration the cases I just mentioned, I still think it works well on the population as a whole to gauge what they have learned.

Part of the complaints about standardized tests is that schools will teach to the test. Basically, that schools know ahead of time what specific topics will be covered on the test, possibly even the specific questions, and so the test is no longer a true measure of the students' learning.

To put it in practical terms: Imagine that you were required to be able to speak French, and that I was assigned to teach it to you. Further, I know that you will be asked to say "Hello, my name is James." "I would like to go to the pool." and "When I was young, I played basket ball."

Now, instead of teaching you the language itself, since I am to be paid based on your performance on those three questions, I can get away with teaching you to mimic "Bonjower, je mahpel James.", "Je voodray alay a la pissene." and "Kahn jaytay jun jay jooay o basket"

You know nothing about the tenses used, nor even necessarily what the individual words mean (as evidenced by my butchering of the spelling, you don't even need to know that). All you know is those three sentences, yet you will be certified as "speaking French." While this is a simplified example, it is indicative of why there's a mistrust for standardized tests, at least the way they're impletmented currently.

Were the tests structured similarly to the ACT or the SAT test: covering a very broad number of topics, some below and some beyond the scope of the grade being tested so we could see not just that the bare minimums are being met, but which schools are actually excelling at what subjects, and which are failing at what subjects. If the questions, or at least specific information about what kinds of questions, were not available to the schools, they would be forced to make sure the students actually understood the subject matter, instead of just being able to spit out the answers to a few relatively narrow areas.

I'm all for standardized testing so long as the tests are well designed, well implemented, and the people looking at the results understand the limitations of standardized tests.

I'm dubious about government imposed standardized testing as a basis for school funding because, as John Galbraith said, "You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too."