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realtors love to sell houses in towns with high standardized test scores. Note that this phoniness about living in one place being a guarantee of a child's school success is so ingrained among real estate agents that they still talk like that even in Minnesota, where there is statewide public school open enrollment, such that the school district where I live has students come in from FORTY-ONE other school districts' territories, including neighborhoods with radically different socioeconomic characteristics. Parents are always looking for some easy proxy for school quality. Power to shop here in Minnesota is helping somewhat in focusing parents' attention on what really matters. (For example, there are more and more school districts now that are adopting the Singapore Primary Mathematics series http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_US_Ed_s/39.... as elementary mathematics textbooks.) What's really difficult today is finding out which schools offer genuine added value above what any child could get from an involved set of parents who value education. (This is why I homeschool, even in my apparently very desirable school district, which we live in for employment-based reasons irrespective of the school system.) The interesting article that you kindly submitted here makes the case that young people should do more in youth than what can boil down to answering pencil-and-paper questions on standardized tests, and I agree, and that is another reason we homeschool--to have time for more hands-on, constructive activities. But I will point out that is not an either-or forced choice, as several other comments have also pointed out to you. Indeed, sometimes open-ended projects favor children from wealthy families much more than student evaluation based on learning 3 R subjects that can be tested by standardized tests. The people in my generation in Taiwan were very proud of their standardized test system. When I first went over to Taiwan in 1982, several people pointed out to me that the president's son failed the college entrance exams--in other words, the examination system was above political corruption, fairly administered to all. It certainly served as a path to higher education for many young people who grew up in third-world poverty and had little by way of spare resources for doing projects with anything but school resources. (There IS project-based learning in all the schools of east Asia, contrary to the impression of many Americans, but rather than an either-or forced choice, those schools have a both-and of projects for all, and rigorous standardized tests for all.) Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Make the tests relevant and well written, and accurately scored, and make the 3 R's learning in school efficient enough to allow time for challenging projects. And if the school is resistant to improvement, promote power to shop on the part of parents to nudge schools to do better, and meanwhile get your own children a good education however you can, even if it means that they learn outside school. |