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I appreciate the intent of those who wish to maintain high standards and keep the kids well educated, but there is no point in having this argument without the

• sam0x17 5y ago
  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.
  • josephcsible 5y ago
    This is a test for teachers, not for their students. Are you suggesting that teachers who are worse at math should be paid more?
    • klyrs 5y ago
      I'd suggest that those teachers need more resources -- in terms of education, and additional helpers in the classroom.
  • fallingknife 5y ago
    Why would you waste your best teachers on your worst students?
    • feurio 5y ago
      Because they are the ones who will see the biggest benefit from a good teacher. And concomitantly your country will benefit from a higher level of preficiency in maths of the population.
      • fallingknife 5y ago
        Going from 25th percentile to 75th at math does little good. Going from 90th percentile to 99th is more valuable. Better to have a population that has a lower median math skill, but many math geniuses than a population that has a slightly higher median, but few right tail geniuses.
        • nisegami 5y ago
          In a democracy, I strongly disagree. The masses have a tremendous impact on the society that your geniuses have to live in.
        • feurio 5y ago
          If you're a genius, you're a genius - an average teacher would be able to point you in the direction of the more specialised coaching that would benefit you. 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.
      • dahfizz 5y ago
        > Because they are the ones who will see the biggest benefit from a good teacher. 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-improve-test-scores-here-s-what-might-3d46ebf5c1d https://medium.com/@tgof137/increased-school-funding-doesnt-... [2] https://www.alec.org/article/increasing-education-spending-equal-higher-test-scores/ https://www.alec.org/article/increasing-education-spending-e...
    • sanxiyn 5y ago
      Since worst students have most to improve, I'd think it's efficient not wasteful.
      • tuesdayrain 5y ago
        This is a fallacy, similar to thinking that a portfolio should be invested into the worst performing stocks because "they have the most room to improve".
        • sanxiyn 5y ago
          Education and stock market are not analogous. The key question is whether current level is correlated with expected improvement. For education it is, for stock market it isn't.
          • tuesdayrain 5y ago
            >Education and stock market are not analogous Why not? A company is just an aggregate of people working towards a shared mission. Not unlike a society.
            • tomrod 5y ago
              What is the unifying goal of the community you live in? 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.
    • watwut 5y ago
      So that you improve the students. So that you give more support to teachers working in harder conditions.
      • fallingknife 5y ago
        The right and left tail of the distribution are not equal and offsetting here. The cost to society from one idiot is more than offset by the benefit of one genius. Therefore equality is not a desirable outcome. Optimizing the abilities of the right tail is.
        • watwut 5y ago
          I dont really think so. First of all, math geniuses are fighting among themselves for a few positions that allow them to actually use hard math. We produce more of them then we can reasonably use. Second, teacher able to move kids up from "idiots" is actually saving us a lot of money.
    • tuesdayrain 5y ago
      There is a certain brand of person who is obsessed with redistributing resources from the most productive to the least productive. They don't see how allocating the best teachers in the world to students who are disabled or borderline disabled is not beneficial to society.
      • jimnotgym 5y ago
        I suppose you could be the best at teaching disabled people...that might be a different person to the best at teaching maths to the highest achievers.
      • jakear 5y ago
        Yes this. As someone who was “gifted” in school but with a father who teaches mild/moderate learning disabilities, the skill sets of the two ends of the spectrum of teachers are dramatically different. “Gifted” student teachers can take as a given that their students are there to learn and generally speaking want to be there. For my father getting students to begin to think that is a big part of the job. To replace him with a “gifted” student teacher who has no experience with that type of clientele would be absurd.
  • thirdlamp 5y ago
    That would be rewarding incompetent schools and every school would try to have the worst scores to secure the most funding.
  • champagnois 5y ago
    Three things: (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.
    • whitexn--g28h 5y ago
      Have you considered that Jordan Peterson is part of the problem with the education system? I doubt he could pass this math test given the arguments he’s trying to make about marxists.
      • champagnois 5y ago
        I do not think it is worthwhile to engage in cults of personality. I do not obsess over him or anyone else (outside of my family). 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.
• hellojesus 5y ago
  Agreed. Which is why public education wasn't supposed to be enacted at the federal level. It is a state concern, or, more appropriately, a private one. Edit: US perspective
  • jonny_eh 5y ago
    Public education is administered at the provincial level in Canada.
    • dmix 5y ago
      And is administratively split between two major institutions here in Ontario. The public school system and the catholic school board.
      • nfgrep 5y ago
        And I believe the public system is divided further still by region. Near-north district school board, Toronto district school board, etc. (Though I’m unsure how much autonomy each board has.)
        • whitexn--g28h 5y ago
          None in terms of curriculum
  • nfgrep 5y ago
    By “private” do you mean entirely un-subsidized? i.e parents pay for their child’s education?
    • hellojesus 5y ago
      Yes, exactly. With respect to the US: Don't get me wrong. States can enact a public education and directly tax residents to fund it, but the federal government was not enumerated that power in the Constitution.
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• sanxiyn 5y ago
  > I've seen no good reason to think that standardized testing is something that improves this situation Standardized testing is a measurement. Measurement is necessary to improve, but not the improvement itself.
  • threatofrain 5y ago
    Further, every classroom in some way employs standardized measurement, unless we're talking about classrooms where some students get a fundamentally different exam. For the same reasons of comparable measurements, an instructor for a course would have difficulty knowing how well people are doing if everyone took different tests. The "standard" part of an exam simply means that the person who is metaphorically sitting next to you doesn't get an easier, harder, or weirder test. IMO this is a return to administrative opacity and favor trading.
    • sanxiyn 5y ago
      You are right in the literal sense, but "standardized test" is usually used to mean test administered to a group larger than a classroom.
  • klyrs 5y ago
    Not to get all Heisenberg about this, but in my experience, standardized testing is a measurement which can have a significant impact on the education system. I'm not familiar with Ontario's system, but No Child Left Behind was a travesty because teachers had a strong mandate to teach to the test, and spend months on test-prep. Education got worse as a result. And then there's the matter of what the measurement is used for -- NCLB was used not to bring help to the schools that needed it most, but to punish them and reward the ones that were relatively well off -- closing schools in poor neighborhoods (reducing local employment) and lengthening those students' commutes (further raising the barrier for them to participate in their education).
    • abernard1 5y ago
      > Education got worse as a result. While NCLB had negative side effects, education in America has been getting worse since the 1960s. The SAT is substantially easier than it was in the 1960s as well. NCLB had no impact on test scores either, so how do we even know education got "worse" if we've given up broad-based statistical evaluation criteria? Seriously, what's the measuring stick other than an assertion? > closing schools in poor neighborhoods This might as well be a talking point from the NEA. Real-adjusted education expenses in America have tripled in the last 50-60 years. There has never been more funding or power for public education than now and we've never had as incompetent or entitled class of teachers as we do now.
• Aunche 5y ago
  > it's extremely rare that you get improvement in large bureaucratic systems by making things harder on the people on the bottom, without also providing means and resources to make things better. I definitely wouldn't want to be legally represented by a lawyer that failed to pass the bar exam or receive surgery from a doctor who failed the USMLE. Would I care that my Spanish teacher failed a math exam? Probably not. However, so long as there isn't any evidence of discriminatory intent, this should be decided through a legislature, not a court.
• bargle0 5y ago
  Autonomy and better funding have done absolutely nothing in some US school districts that are perennially near the top in terms of money spent per pupil. In order for things to change: 1. Parents have to care 2. Parents need to know how to support education at home Both of those are sorely lacking in said districts. No local politician likes that because it means pointing the finger of blame at the electorate (being the parents). I don’t know what the answer is.
• kansface 5y ago
  I’m ignorant of research into the efficacy of standards within bureaucracies for which you make a very strong claim - do you have some convenient evidence you can share?