American students face a ridiculous amount of testing. Now we learn that the testing too, is ridiculous. John Oliver explains how standardized tests impact school funding, the achievement gap, how often kids are expected to throw up. It’s true. Within the last ten years, standardized testing allows for a certain percentage of students to throw up on their test booklets, and you would too!
Students are expected to take approximately 113 standardized tests by the time they graduate from high school; and no amount of rallying with dancing monkeys can stop them from experiencing extreme anxiety – or like thousands, simply walking out on the tests. Frankly, walking out is the healthiest thing to do. I believe you’ll agree with me when you watch John explain the average standardized test, given in secret, and graded by people who answer Craigs’ List ads…You can’t make this stuff up. By the way, the kids aren’t suffering mere test anxiety. They can handle tests; but these tests are wildcards. You can ‘ace’ it and still get a lousy grade. We will have a nation of people suffering from test-induced PTSD in a few years.
We are in this mess because someone realized that American kids were no longer leading the pack world-wide in math and reading scores, in fact, our scores were among the lowest.This called for action, in the form of the “No Child Left Behind’ program. The program, which is based on a cattle birthing math formula, became a ten ton gorilla. After ten years of ‘standardized testing’ we have corrupt and excessive tests, ties between student grades and teacher salaries, and American students score even lower than they did ten years ago.
The system is so dysfunctional, that some students must cope with scoring low, although they have performed perfectly. There is something wrong with that cattle birthing formula, I suspect it is ‘new math.’
John explains how the system has enriched multiple companies. It pays and fires teachers with a cattle birthing formula…Of course I didn’t make that up. The test confuses children with talking pineapples who race hares? Last – the system operates by rules of transparency similar to those used by Brad Pitt in ‘Fight Club.’ Under these circumstances,and in crisis mode, how do we turn it all around?