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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

If you were a parent, and you couldn't afford to educate your child yourself, then it would probably still make sense to send your child to school beyond grade 6. If you don't do so, they won't have the qualifications to get by particularly well in life...

My rebuttal: Your secretary does not need to know (taken from the sheets you posted) what an angle given by a line bisecting two parallel lines is...These things all have a use, but they don't have a use to everyone...

Your idealistic answer seems to argue for changing the relevant topics. That's fine. That's an argument against the curriculum, not testing. All testing does is measure whether the curriculum is actually being taught.

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All testing does is measure whether a very narrow curriculum taught in a very specific way with a very specific text and test prep guide as guidance is being taught. Since so much is put on not only passing these tests but improving every year (a near mathematical impossibility) schools define their curriculum by what is being tested, not what constitutes a well-rounded education (backed by scientific studies into the importance of topics and areas of study not tested).

You know what generally gets better test scores out of kids? More time spent studying how to answer questions and rote memorization of test topics. All done studying that stuff? If you study it more maybe one kid does better and we get more funding.

> Your idealistic answer seems to argue for changing the relevant topics. That's fine. That's an argument against the curriculum, not testing. All testing does is measure whether the curriculum is actually being taught.

A relevant curriculum is going to be different depending on what someone's interested in and what jobs are available - and what you measure and incentivise is what you get. Testing is not politically neutral.

There isn't anything wrong with testing, in principle, at some point you have to see whether someone can do the job. But the decision as to what to test, when, how... that influences what you're going to end up with. Just standardising the tests and running them often is a bad approach. That's what I'm saying.

Yes, testing does enforce the curriculum. If you don't like the curriculum, that might be bad.

I'm curious though: why do you think that, absent testing, teachers would be ignoring the prescribed curriculum and secretly implementing your preferred curriculum instead? If they are not secretly doing this, then without testing teachers wouldn't be doing what you want them to do anyway.

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