[germinalphrase]

The difficult solution is increasing the accuracy and “trustability” of k12 assessments. As is, high school educators are not assessing their student in a manner that allows for real judgements of their students’ knowledge/capabilities/creativity/etc. by an outside party. We spend immense amounts of money, time, and effort creating and assessing students in school, but the results are only useful with the context of progressing within those specific courses.

Trustable assessments would go a long way to accurately rewarding merit.

[threatofrain]

Currently standardized testing better predicts future academic performance than years of GPA, which in a way is the sum of teachers’ views on a student.

But teachers still prefer teachers over standard tests, and they shun conversation with their researching peers. The classroom is their kingdom and that’s how people prefer it.

[germinalphrase]

“Teacher tests” often have different objectives than solely measuring one student’s ability compared to another. Likewise, the investments made in the creation of standardized tests are not likely to be matched by classroom teachers due to logistical constraints even if they have the necessary knowledge to create an equally valid assessment.

The objective should be the creation of a system that allows teachers to retain the flexibility to modify curriculum in a manner appropriate to their specific student population while also maintaining the trust and reliability benefits found in standardized tests.