That said, standardized testing _would_ make sense if it determined where funding is allocated, i.e. lowest scoring areas get the most funding and the highest paid teachers.
(1) One genius inventor like Newton is worth more than an infinite number of idiots. No exceptions.
(2) If education becomes a meaningless credential where everyone gets a participation trophy -- then educational attainment itself will be completely disregarded as a metric used to compare individuals. Thus, this drive to use the resources of education (while it is currently a prestigious metric) to try and balance for differences in the cognitive abilities given to us by DNA is going to harm the reputation of the credential altogether.
(3) When accreditated, public education is reduced to a daycare, the private sector WILL fill the void by producing an alternative system while also calling for defunding the public system as it had been rendered useless by "good intentioned" radical race marxists.
While the man is accomplished and respected, his ideas are just ideas that he puts out there with the hope that we consider them and improve upon them.
You question his aptitude for math. Ok. I see no reason to have a thought on that particular matter.
The idea that the education system has a problen at all is an idea that suggests the education system isn't achieving a particular goal. The differences in perspectives all come from having a different goal.
Here is a breakdown of the differences in goals:
(1) Marxists in our society believe education's goal should be to achieve equal credentials for all people -- they view the contest and competition aspect as a negative.
Standardized tests inevitably reveal the different levels of intelligence between groups despite their afforded equal opportunities(which then makes a good argument for why we have disparate outcomes and is thus an ideological threat to marxists).
(2) Some marxists also view the aspect of actually training people to reach their maximal potential (IE fostering the genius of someone like Newton or Einstein) to be irrelevant to their goals. They just do not care about this aspect. They would rather advanced math classes be cancelled than see their ideology be dismantled by standardized scientific testing.
(3) A rather silent group of, say, "meritocrats" believes people are different, differences are beautiful, and differences create bellcurves of both athletic prowess and brain prowess. Standardized testing is the only way to assess people and see where their brain falls on the intelligence bellcurve. Education is valued as a way to foster our civilization's geniuses so that they reach their full potential.
People who disagree with you aren't universally Marxists, though people with Marxists philosophy may also disagree with you.
I have lived under communist governments. It is what it is, even if you refuse the label.
People are innately different. Marxism, in all iterations, has always been about blaming the different outcomes on some narrative of oppression, be it class or race.
To avoid distractions I would therefore prefer a better label than "Marxist" that doesn't come with all the historical baggage, and is more precise.
Why not? A company is just an aggregate of people working towards a shared mission. Not unlike a society.
We don't have one in mine, the US. We have anarchists and right-wing stochastic terrorists and suburban dwellers engaged in the rat race and college professors seeking tenure and veterans working to find good healthcare and teachers paying way too much out of pocket for their classroom supplies and business owners often cheating to milk PPP loans or other shady revenue streams and public work officials making side deals and.....
If the bottom line is GDP, let me introduce you to GNP, and both of which miss cottage industry generally.
We don't have a shared mission, because society does not have a tangible owner.
Second, teacher able to move kids up from "idiots" is actually saving us a lot of money.
For the kind of people who don't seem to be able to weigh up basic risk levels and end up dying unvaccinated at six times the rate of those that do, I'd suggest that going up enough percentiles to save their lives would be, yeah, kinda useful.
This is a big assertion, and one not well supported by data[1][2].
Money is not the bottleneck at any public school in the West. A student's performance is very well correlated to external factors like parental income and education level, and is NOT well correlated with the amount of money the state spends on education. Utah spends a third of New York per student, and still outperforms in test scores.
I agree that the best teachers should go to the students who would benefit from those teachers the most. The students that would benefit most from good teachers are the good students, who exist in an environment that enables them to learn and excel.
[1] https://medium.com/@tgof137/increased-school-funding-doesnt-...
[2] https://www.alec.org/article/increasing-education-spending-e...
Money isn't the bottleneck, but teacher quality is.
> lowest scoring areas get the most funding and the highest paid teachers.
I think using highest paid teachers as a proxy for best teachers makes sense in this context, because that's how the public policy works. A state looking to hire better teachers would raise teacher salaries in order to attract better teachers.