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My understanding is that schools are run for the convenience of administrators, who want metrics based performance to look at like butts in seats, test scores, cost per student, etc

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I have no doubt administrators have a large role to play in this but "test scores" and "cost per student" seem like perfectly fine metrics by which to judge schools, no?

Metrics are meaningless without context, useful only for snap judgements by peanut galleries. Judging by metric is an pernicious antipattern that sounds good but the public and politicians rarely have the time for the contextualization necessary to make truly “data-driven decisions”. This is true outside of school management as well.

"I literally don't have the time to cover the Indian Wars or Jim Crow south while still covering what I need to cover so my students can pass the state standardized test"

-A teacher I was talking to last week

Point is, test scores aren't perfect.

What's the alternative?

The idea is to get rid of all standardized testing, so that there will be no contraindications to the story of public school excellence.

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