Feds to cut $1.3 billion in education funding, but the tests will survive

[dballance]

1. There is a Lot Here to Cover

First, if taxpayers are going to have to pony up for internet for all students then the billions should be put toward the free public WiFi that the FCC proposed earlier this month. That would kill two birds with one stone (at least two). We'd get the students internet at school and home and we'd get the low-income and otherwise underserved people internet too. Not having internet access is quite a disadvantage these days (yes, call me captain obvious). Of course, there is still the issue of whether or not that same set of people has access to a device with which to use the internet outside of schools and public libraries - but let me jump off one bridge at a time.

Second, the parents and teachers need to start speaking out against these tests like they did in Seattle. The teachers in Seattle stated their refusal to administer the tests because they felt the tests were not meaningful and took away from instruction time. Not to mention the testing drives schools to teach to the tests as if they are some sort of Kaplan test-prep organization. The Seattle teachers got the parents on board with all that and the parents became part of the resistance. In one school around 300 of the 400 or so students' parents opted them out of taking the tests. So the school administrators who administered the test in place of the teachers only had about 10% of the students taking it. That's not a statistically valid sample for the school so no conclusions based on the test results should be made. I don't know that opting out your kid is an option in all cases. But where it is then it would be a good thing, in my opinion, to start a effort to get parents to do that en masse. The fewer the number of students that take the test the less valid are the results of the tests for comparing schools and teachers to national averages. And the national averages become less valid as well since they wouldn't really be national.

The testing regime is not going to change from the top down. Just like everything else these days, we citizens are going to have to push the changes up. It used to be almost enough to just vote in legislators who supported your positions and then go back to your day-to-day life after elections. Now, that's not even remotely good enough.