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Fail the test? Blame the test.
(AP photo)
Every pupil, poor, passing or high performing who has ever endured the public school experience in the U.S.A. has at the very least taken away one life's lesson that will stick forever.
Last September the state of Maine gave their kiddos a lasting lesson. They tossed out the test results of a writing exam because 78 percent of the nearly 15,000 eighth-graders who took it blew it.
The state educrats decided that the test was flawed. They couldn't blame the kids for being little know-nothings since that might permanently damage the darling's tender little psyches and completely obliterate their self-esteem. And they obviously couldn't blame the state's public teaching corps since the teachers union could get the state's professional public education administrative corps kicked out of their jobs.
So the problem had to be the test itself. And when the test is bad, you toss the results.
Their reasoning was that, according to The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, (a) many students reacted emotionally rather than intellectually to the test question so the test must be invalid, (b) fifty percent more test-takers failed this year than last so the test must be invalid, and (c) quoting the director of educational planning in Portland Public Schools, "There just aren't that many kids in the state who would perform below standard if the test were valid" so the test must be invalid.
This is a lesson everyone in every walk of life can apply to his or her existence.
In a year-end head-to-head game that decided which team would make the playoffs, the Philadelphia Eagles drubbed the Dallas Cowboys 44 to 6, making it one of the worst losses in the Texas team's history.
Maybe NFL officials should toss the results on the basis that the players with the stars on their helmets did better against the Eagles last year than this year so the game must have been invalid.
And what about that big presidential thing back in November? The Yes We Can Man beat the Straight-Talk Express Maverick 365 to 173 electoral votes. Republican Party officials should demand that the results be tossed. Obviously, voters reacted emotionally rather than intellectually to the campaign so the voting must be invalid.
And Libertarians know all about situations like these. The Libertarian Party presidential candidate (who was that again?) garnered 0.40 percent of the vote nationally. Someone has to step up to the mic and announce, "There just aren't that many people in the nation who would cast ballots against the idea of maximizing freedom and minimizing government if the voting were valid." So the balloting must be invalid.
The Maine assessment is not just an isolated case.
At about the same time, the Boston Globe reported that the percentage of sophomores who passed the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exam on their first try declined for the first time because a science section was included for the first time and thousands of students tanked it.
If Bay State educrats had been paying attention to their Pine Tree counterparts they would have tossed the results on the basis that the test was invalid.
So here's the life's lesson we can all take from this: If the marriage went bad the union was invalid, If you didn't get that raise your job review was invalid, if you got caught robbing that liquor store the law is invalid, and if your kid grows up to be a loser, a boozer, a hacker or a slacker all those parenting books you read were invalid.
YOU can do no wrong.
Libertarian Party on Education
The Socialism of Public Schooling
Comments
So true! This happens in all life-departments. It's common here in Montana for drivers to blame "the snow" for their car accidents. Maybe they should "invalidate" their cars.
Good point about the voting ...
HOWEVER ... it truly is possible to have horribly written tests and I, for one, am glad to hear that SOMEONE is questioning the Validity of the TESTS!!
I have long questioned the validity of the Texas TAKS Math Tests ... I believe they are poorly written and deliberately confusing in order to keep students failing, keep teachers failing, and keep public schools looking inept.
After all ... if students were actually successful, therefore making teachers and public schools successful, they might have to actually pay teachers more!
Sorry Lucinda, but there is no conspiracy here. The problem is simple: government can no more educate children than dog-catchers can perform brain surgery. Governments govern. Educators educate. Government educators necessarily play politics rather than educate. Public school children are just lab rats for political-driven agendas. And teachers get paid what they get paid because they work for a coercive monopoly rather than for parents and students in a competitive free market of educational choices.
Hi Garry,
Love the article, but you're missing "stuff" your reader might find helpful to explain the background issues and root causes for the above "test failure."
See:
"American teens have long been in chaos, suffering high rates of depression, suicide, crime, substance abuse, pregnancy, and other serious problems. Until about a century ago, however, the teenage years were relatively benign, and adolescence as we know it barely existed. Through most of human history, young people were integrated into adult society early on, but beginning in the late 1800s, new laws and cultural practices began to isolate teens from adults, imposing on them an increasingly large set of restrictions and artificially extending childhood well past puberty. New research suggests that teens today are subjected to more than ten times as many restrictions as are most adults, and adulthood is delayed until well into the twenties or thirties. It's likely that the turmoil we see among teens is an unintended result of the artificial extension of childhood."
-- THE CASE AGAINST ADOLESCENCE, Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, by Robert Epstein, Ph.D. ( www.reasontofreedom.com/the_case_against_adolescence_by_robert_epstein_ph_d.html )
And the US public school system has had a hundred year plan in place to make it the failure it is today. It's never even been very hidden, see:
"Forced schooling was the medicine to bring the whole continental population into conformity with these plans so that it might be regarded as a 'human resource' and managed as a 'work force.' No more Ben Franklins or Tom Edisons could be allowed; they set a bad example. One way to manage this was to see to it that individuals were prevented from taking up their working lives until an advanced age when the ardor of youth and its insufferable self-confidence had cooled. ...
"For a considerable time ... social managers of schooling were remarkably candid about what they were doing. In a speech he gave before businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed disclosure:
" 'We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.'
-- The Underground History of American Education," by John Taylor Gatto. ( www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/index.htm )
MJ
The reason why the Libertarian Party did so poorly in the 2008 presidential election was because they were spanked at the polls for offering a former CIA official as a candidate, who had his oratorial skills honed during three terms as a Republican Congressman. And who only lost his job after the Libertarian Party of Georgia launched a publicity campaign against Bob Barr for having authored the law against medical marijuana.
The candidacy of Bob Barr was so repugnant to libertarians, especially those acquainted with John Hospers and Robert Ringer, that many promptly quit the Libertarian Party, as I did. Hospers predicted that the Demopublicans would infiltrate the LP within fifty years, but they sped up their timetable after it cost them $50 million in '92 to make people believe that Perot was Marrou and save America's Demopublican one-party system from a viable second party. Perot grabbed nearly 20% of the vote that would've went to Marrou, but it cost that billionaire a lot of the money he had accumulated by milking government contracts while rubbing shoulders with Daddy Bush for nearly 30 years.
Now that so many members of the LP are retired statists, many collecting CIA and FBI pensions, the Party's over.
I think that both Lucinda and Gary may be right. Certainly the present government "schools" do a poor job (in my opinion, by design) of educating students. Certainly it is also possible to write bad tests, tests that are not an accurate measure of what they claim to be testing.
The article does not give any details of what the test actually is; maybe it is bad, maybe it is good. As a rant, this is a fun article to read. As full and complete reporting, this article is a failure. (Maybe it was written by a public school student!) Nonetheless, there is plenty of evidence that public school students are being dumbed down and trained to be sheep.
The same thing happened in Georgia last year. The Social Studies portion of a mandatory state test (CRCT) was thrown out for 6th & 7th graders because anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of these kids failed STATE WIDE. This problem is systemic. Upon looking at CRCT descriptions found on the Georgia Department of Education website <www.doe.k12.ga.us>, I cannot help but wonder, why did these kids not get a separate text book to prepare for this test?
Ha! Excellent points as usual from Garry Reed.
The problem is far deeper than just the test - however poorly written.
Government schools deliberately, and systematically destroy the ability of the average (and even some gifted) students to actually think for themselves, analyze multiple sources for data, or consider themselves as anything but cogs in the collective wheel.
That is, and has been, the sole purpose of government schools for a very long time. The artificially extended childhood is simply one of the tools to accomplish this.
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