The drive to eliminate all standardized testing has been going on for many years.
It's tragic to see someone so intelligent being so bitter about a thankless job like working in public education.
Want to improve education for the kids?
Give teachers a base salary, plus $X for every student of theirs that meets grade standards at the end of the school year.
----
A long time ago, the company I was working for hired a team of 6 or 7 older contractors to do a special job for IBM. They completed it on time, under budget, and IBM was completely satisfied. They also each received a $10,000 bonus for meeting those conditions (a lot of money in those days). I asked them if the bonus had any relationship with meeting that goal, and they were offended, saying they were professionals and gave it their best regardless.
Haha, I didn't buy that. Do you?
Remember that earthquake in LA where a freeway interchange collapsed? They offered the contractor $1,000,000 for each day ahead of schedule the reconstruction was finished. I don't recall the exact details, but they finished it months ahead of schedule.
Money talks. Want results? Pay for results.
Wouldn't this cause misaligned incentives leading to teachers going out of their way to game the grade standards, similar to what has happened with No Child Left Behind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act#Gamin...
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/gaming-the-nclb-syste...
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-educator-ch...
Not that there probably shouldn't be experimentation with compensation to create incentives, but $X per head is overly simplistic and is the sort of thing that gets gamed all of the time.
Will it be gamed? People will surely try. People try to game the SATs all the time, with some small success. But the SATs are still very useful and effective.
The bottom line is, will better results be achieved with this method? Almost certainly.
P.S. Much of the cheating from on the NCLB system was the people who were affected by the test results were the ones administering the test. Of course that won't work. An independent organization has to administer the tests.
That's a tautology, though. It seems like this is a hypothesis that should be put to the test.
Any profession.
> it wouldnt motivate me
You're a unicorn, then. Pay for results is a big reason why the free market works so well. Socialism relies on altruistic self-sacrifice, and we both know how well that works.
Isn't that how it should be?
This is not the case with standardized testing in education, is it? It's a lot like these tech interviews people keep complaining about that test a knowledge bunch of bullshit you have to cram for but have nothing to do with the actual job.
7 + 3 = ?