The problem is, what are you actually verifying? Mostly memorization and test taking strategies. Wasn’t there just a thread complaining that whiteboard coding interviews are nonsense? It’s the same thing.
“Some sort” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Some kind of assessment - yes, of course. But for example, consider a portfolio of work & a written evaluation vs a multiple choice exam. The latter is definitely easier, faster, and gives you a metric to print, but which is more valuable for the student? Which better demonstrates what you’ve learned?
NB: obviously this is to an extent domain specific. I’m not talking about med school, and I don’t care about your evolving perspective on whether 2+2 equals 4, I just need to know whether you can add.
> The problem is, what are you actually verifying? Mostly memorization and test taking strategies.
If memorization is so useless, explain to me how one studies history without memorizing thousands of facts. Or a foreign language without memorizing thousands of words. Or math without hundreds of rules and conventions.
Yes, you do want to progress further and learn the way those different things you memorized work together, but you can't put things together in your mind if they are not in your mind to put together.
Education is fundamentally voluntary and a student can memorize all this stuff just to pass a test, and not care about it later. If you want to argue this is why we shouldn't mandate school, fine.
But as long as we're mandating students go to school, we may as well check that their schools provided the opportunity to learn something.
Like I mentioned, it’s domain specific to an extent. Tests may be more effective in fields like engineering where there are specific correct answers and methods. But we’re talking about k-12, and nothing you did at caltech is relevant to hs standardized testing.
I remember taking all those standardized tests all through grade school and high school. There was quite an obvious and consistent correlation between those who learned the material and did well on the test, and those who didn't and did poorly.
This remained true whether the test was multiple choice, fill in the blank, or open ended.
Frankly you don’t remember, the sheer amount of testing and degree of standardization has increased tremendously since NCLB. ESSA walked back the testing somewhat, but it’s still very different than when you were in school.
The question is what “learned the material” actually means, and if designing the class around a definition that can be accurately captured on a test is a worthwhile goal. Again though, I want to make it clear that I’m not arguing against assessing what and how students are learning, but specifically against standardized testing.
We can’t spend decades hurfing and blurfing over “failing schools” and then refuse to consider change when what we’ve been doing clearly isn’t working.
Does K-12 education include civil aviation training now? It didn't when I was doing time, but that was in the 80s and 90s when we still did "duck and cover" drills as a placebo for the fear of nuclear holocaust rather than "active shooter" drills.
Furthermore, testing for pilots isn't just filling out a form; there's a practical test as well as a knowledge test.
Pilot training doesn't include teaching math. If you never learned math, you'll wash out of flight school. If you cannot calculate how much fuel you'll need, what your wind drift is, how to distribute the weight, etc., you aren't going to be a pilot.
> Furthermore, testing for pilots isn't just filling out a form; there's a practical test as well as a knowledge test.
You'll never get to the hands on flying part of the test unless you pass ground school tests first. Flying safely and competently is highly technical and nothing like jumping in a car and turning the key. Nobody is going to let you in a cockpit with an excuse like "I don't test well" or "I learn in an alternative fashion" or "I really do know how to fly, the tests are faulty" or the worst of all "I can't handle the stress of a test."
In that case, you have more pressing concerns than the public schools, such as the military-industrial-congressional complex, corporate welfare, and a tax code that privileges rent-seeking over labor.
Nonsense, besides the fact that I can look at more than one budget item at a time, education is one of the biggest[1], being between 20% and 40% of every state's budget.
> ... and a tax code that privileges rent-seeking over labor.
Education also has multiple lobbies that beside their own rent-seeking are indoctrinating young voters and more and more educators are engaging in partisan politics in the classroom.
According to one my neighbors, they just make it harder for her to do her job (as she understands it).
In my case, I score in the 95th percentile or better on just about any standardized test you cared to put in front of me, but when I finally got free of K-12 schooling I only really had three useful skills:
1. How to take a punch.
2. How to dodge a punch.
3. How to throw a punch.
How do you verify that the students learned anything without some sort of tests?