[jltsiren]

Standardized testing is usually foiled by Goodhart's law. If the outcomes of the tests matter, schools start focusing on test prep, at the expense of actual education. It's probably necessary to have one set of standardized tests for college admission, but otherwise they should be abolished, because they are a terrible idea.

Separation of responsibilities is the actual key to good public schools. At least to the extent politicians and administrators can solve the issue. There should be a central entity that sets most of the curriculum and monitors and audits the entities that run the schools. And it must have the power and the resources to intervene if it determines that a school is not performing as expected.

[dyauspitr]

Test prep and actual education don’t have to be all that different. If the test is hard and comprehensive (ie random enough) preparing for the test will teach you a lot. You see this with the SATs where people preparing for it digest 3000+ vocabulary words, write tons of sample essays and really dig into grammar. Same with the MCATs, foreign doctors spend 1-2 preparing for the MCATs and because the tests are so comprehensive you end up learning everything you need to.

Also, I think another very important thing is Asian students rely very little on the quality of the teacher. A lot of the work is self work and extra curricular tuitions. The average Asian is done with school and then goes to two or three hours of additional tuition. This isn’t like the bottom 5%. This is 95% of the student body.

[jltsiren]

You are confusing education with test scores.

The ability to solve hard problems in artificial test conditions is a useful proxy for having learned what is being tested. But only if the test itself is irrelevant. If your future depends on test scores, most people start focusing on what is being tested over what they are actually supposed to learn.

All measurements are proxies. They never measure the thing they are supposed to. That's the essence of Goodhart's law. When people focus on what is being measured, they usually perform worse on whatever it was supposed to measure.

The actual quality of education is your overall contribution to the society over the expected baseline. It can never be measured for individuals but only in aggregate. And only decades after the fact.

[dyauspitr]

I think you’re drawing too much of a distinction here. Education can be just learning for the test. What you’re being tested on can be the entirety of what you need to know. It’s working extremely well for all of Asia. There’s no reason we can’t take away something from that.

[jltsiren]

Education is about building and maintaining a successful society. People have different opinions on how to define success.

Learning for the test is just a pointless excercise. If some part of education has no goals beyond that, it should be abolished as a waste of people's time and money.