Noam Chomsky: Bubble Tests Yield Meaningless Rankings
By Denny Taylor.
The truth is that the fill-in-the-bubble, ranking and sorting, high stakes testing, political reform of public education is a total system failure
“You have to be very cautious and careful about accepting claims by power systems,” Chomsky said to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, July 1, 2015. “They have no reason to tell you the truth. And you have to look and ask, ‘What is the truth?’”
Chomsky gets at the truth on high-stakes testing and calls for action in this interview:
In recent years there’s a strong tendency to require assessment of children and teachers, so that you have to teach to the tests, and the test determines what happens to the child and what happens to the teacher. That’s guaranteed to destroy any meaningful educational process.It means a teacher cannot be creative, imaginative, pay attention to individual students’ needs. The students can’t pursue things that – maybe some kid is interested in something, but you can’t do it because you need to memorize something for this test tomorrow. The teacher’s future depends on it as well as the student’s.The people sitting in offices, the bureaucrats designing this, they’re not evil people, butNoam Chomsky: Bubble Tests Yield Meaningless Rankings - Living in Dialogue:
