TO TEST OR NOT TO TEST?
BY JEFF MANGUM – POMERANDO NEWS | HTTP://BIT.LY/O13ER5
- Poway is a city of 50,000 located north of the city of San Diego and south of the city of Escondido in San Diego County.
“I recently read an article about cheating on standardized tests — by teachers, not by students. This encapsulates much of what’s wrong with public education: Over emphasis on standardized tests, unwillingness to address deeper systemic problems, a pervasive lack of honesty and integrity from students and parents through teachers and administration (and let’s be realistic, through state legislatures and Congress), unfairly placing all the blame for education failures on teachers, and so on. Why does the Poway Unified School District rely so much on standardized tests?“ Molly, mother of three
The easy answer is that state and federal law requires standardized testing. In 2002 Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which mandated annual testing in all 50 states.
Jeff Mangum writes this education column and is the Poway Unified School District Board Clerk >>
But that simplistic response does not adequately address what is a very significant debate among educators, policy makers and politicians. The expanded use of standardized testing to make important policy decisions — so called high-stakes testing — is an issue that every parent needs to understand and every voter should consider. This is a very big deal.