Comment by thedufer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thedufer | Hacker News Reader

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You're extending your experience to that of a public school teacher, and that's simply not a fair comparison. I'll try to touch all of the ways in which your situation is different and why this has a bearing on the subject at hand:

-You have fewer students. This is a _much_ bigger deal than you make it out to be, especially at higher grade levels. When you have to give feedback to close to 200 students (over 200 it not unheard of), you can't make it as meaningful as you'd like. There are things you can do with a couple dozen students that simply does not scale.

-You are dealing with an easier subset of children. If their parents want them to have extra lessons, and are both willing and able to pay for it (or even fill out scholarship forms), then you're not dealing with any of the difficult kids. Parents who don't care about school beget kids who don't care, and they are orders of magnitude more difficult to work with.

-Its clear that you are not aware of how much material these standardized tests expect you to cover in a course. I'm sure it varies by state, but this is from the perspective of VA testing, which is where I grew up and where I know many teachers. For just about any tested middle or high school class, they have the material mapped to within 3 or 4 days of the length of the school year. A couple of unexpected days off and they have to start cutting material that the test expects to be covered. There's absolutely no time to do the things you're talking about unless you want to blow off the tests - and then you're out of a job.

Standardized testing, _in its current form_, is an unmitigated disaster for students' educations. If you can say otherwise having actually faced the system you are so happy with (or even talked to a few who have), then we have a conversation.

The question is - would it be worse without testing or better? As the poster above notes from his own experience, some "math teachers", for example, do everything but actually teaching math. And from my own experience, being educated outside of the US, teachers vary dramatically in quality, with bad ones much more frequent than good ones and the majority being below average, and bad teacher usually means next to no education on the topic (I still have knowledge gaps in subjects where I had bad teachers, which I regret a lot but don't have enough time/mental agility to fill properly). The tests give you some kind of standardized quality, which is akin to McDonalds - nobody would call it a gourmet food. But the question would be - is the alternative a Michelin-starred restaurant or no food at all?

> The tests give you some kind of standardized quality

No, they don't. It remains nearly impossible to fire a teacher thanks to unions.

Note that I'm not arguing against standardized testing. But in its current form, it leads to kids being taught to memorize and how to take a multiple choice test (and nothing else, thanks to the breadth of the tests), rather than any useful skills. I do, in fact, believe that we'd be better off with no tests than with what we currently have.

Its also worth noting that the only way the tests are used in most states is to punish at a school level. Schools who underperform, inevitably those in poor neighborhoods, lose funding and are occasionally shut down. This actually makes the problem worse - it leads to fewer, less funded schools in exactly the areas that need them most.

Finally, the person who's experience you're drawing from was speaking about elementary schools. Please take my words only in reference to middle and high schools - I don't want to pretend to have knowledge about the situation in elementary schools.

The fact that it is impossible to fire bad teachers does not really prove tests do not produce some positive effects on these teachers, forcing them to at least teach something to the test, instead of teaching nothing at all. Again, you seem to be comparing "how teachers would teach if they had no tests and were excellent teachers" to "how teachers have to teach with tests". However, the sad reality is the excellent teachers are rare, and without tests nothing prevents a teacher from spending a year of math class discussing how they students feel when they look at numbers and why math is inherently sexist, while teaching no actual math at all.

It is long known that throwing money at a problem is not solving the problem of poor performance of schools. Poorly performing schools spend the same money per pupil as best private schools and still remain poorly performing. The solution, if it exists, appears to be more complex than pouring more money into it. Maybe solving the problem with the unions is a part of it.

>>>> I do, in fact, believe that we'd be better off with no tests than with what we currently have.

Could you explain why? I.e. if we now abolished all testing, how the situation would improve in average case?

> without tests nothing prevents a teacher from spending a year of math class discussing how they students feel when they look at numbers and why math is inherently sexist

Tests with no consequences don't prevent a teacher from doing so, either. My experience (and that of teachers I know) is that bad teachers don't particularly care how the tests turn out, since there aren't direct consequences, while good teachers do care and adjust accordingly. This comes about because bad teaching correlates (unsurprisingly) with not caring how the school as a whole looks compared to other schools.

> Could you explain why?

If we abolished tests, bad teachers would continue doing what they do now and what they did before testing, while good teachers would stop spending all their time teaching how to memorize facts and take multiple choice tests, and leave time for teaching how to think.

I would like to point out that 200 students per class in a public high school does not appear to be a worldwide phenomenon. High school classes in Europe appear to be much smaller.

Sorry to not be specific. This article is about the US, as is my comment.

I also was talking about 200 students per teacher, not per class, which comes about because middle and high school teachers generally teach 5-7 classes, of 20-35 (although sometime) students.

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