mccabemi wrote:This incidentally, is why we have all this testing craze- because we do not allow the labor markets to function properly and then try to find a fix on the other end.
No Child Left Behind and the testing mania come from even more complex confluences. I facilely see it as a left-wing and right-wing conspiracy, but I realize that is over-simplification.
I will interject that I'm skeptical of the view that the main thing wrong with our schools is that we have all these bad teachers. I'm sure there must be some, maybe a lot. I come with the bias of having grown up in a Southern mill town of 16,000 people and encountering at worst one mediocre teacher in my twelve years of school there. A lot of the teachers were outstanding, and several were amazing. They influence my life to this day.
In terms of testing, I think the cure is worse than the disease. So much time is spent teaching to the test that it is a wonder that subject matter gets covered at all. I realize that some of the content will accidentally seep through the teaching to the test process, but hardly as much as if they could just deal with the purported subject matter.
The education-industrial complex certainly has their lobbyists, so the situation is unlikely to change much. Companies that make the tests sell books and software for teachers to use to teach the test. Etc.
A buddy in Pensacola called me the other day. He was on his commute home from his last day at school. He is now retired, and glad of it. He has directed bands at the middle and high schools and taught math and history among other things. The mix varied from year to year as needed, since he could do all those things well, and more, as you'd probably expect of a friend of mine.
We had talked at length in April as we often do, since he somehow manages to screw up his installation of TurboTax most years in ways that I have trouble imagining. This year he had downloaded the program to his wife's computer and couldn't transfer it to his somehow and couldn't find the password to download it to his computer, or maybe he'd have to pay for it again, or something. He also had it on an optical disc which his computer couldn't read somehow. OK, so there are things he's not super competent at, like remembering where he left a certain cable.
As I'm trying to get my mind around all the Murphy's Law corollaries we were encountering, he went off on a tirade on school testing and the state legislature. Five weeks before the end of the semester his students were being tested on material to be covered in the rest of the semester.
So if there are bad teachers, even worse teachers are the legislators who set educational policies they don't understand.
When I was a kid, teachers were given respect and a good degree of autonomy in their classroom. If a kid acted up, it was the kid's fault. Now it's an occasion for the parents to complain about the teacher. If the state bureaucrats and legislators make dopey educational policy, it's the fault of the teachers, and they just need more micromanagement and busy work.
The real wonder is that we have so many good teachers left. I don't know how long that can last.