Education Overturned
Written by redqueeninla in Education
“Teaching To The Test” is a pegagogical revolution. Far from benign, it amounts to a coup d’état of not only the minds of our children, but their hearts as well.
Informally, in my personal experience, I became vaguely aware by rumor during the 70′s that some students broke the rules and gamed standardized tests (e.g., SAT and other nationally-generated and administered, computer-graded, entrance exams) by spending a lot of money cramming extracurricularly, all for purportedly little or no gain. Unprofessionally, it was sniffed, some select classroom teachers even debased their craft by gearing its very content, the “curriculum”, toward standardized tests. In so narrowing the classes’ focus, these practitioners simultaneously devalued the tests by introducing bias, pandered to ambitious students and parents and capitulated to self-aggradizement at the expense of their very profession, scholastics.
Flash-forward forty years and it seems the essence of modern “Educational Reform” is to upend that formerly degenerate state of teaching and retool it as The Solution.
This is a new twist on The Big Lie where something wrong is repeated so loudly and frequently that it becomes gospel; this is actually reversing formerly-believed gospel and rebranding it as wrong while its inverse becomes the New Best Practice. The New Black is not just a competing color, but its reverse, the absence of color, say, White.
So in the New Educational Order, computerized Common Core “State” Standards (CCSS) are manifested in tests generated and administered nationally by non-educators, and instructional materials will be back-filled to “align” with the Standards as manifested in the tests.
Not only has it become desirable, therefore, to teach to a test, it is mandated.Teachers are being trained and installed in computerized lesson-administration, replacing experienced teachers of a previous generation who understood such Education Overturned – redqueeninla: