Most things in public school today are test prep. Math, science, english... doesn't make a difference. Public education is about getting 'good grades' by beating exams and not getting caught when you cheat.

Learning?
maybe it's secondary.

This was my experience, and it was not long ago.

 

-----signature-----

We could easily afford music and sports in schools if business owners like yourself would quit cheating on their taxes and/or abusing the tax code.It erks me that you think it is perfectly ok for us to pay for a meal for you and your wife that you are more than capable of paying for,but money to teach kids an art or a sport "oh we need to cut back there,can't afford that!"(probably said with large chunks of tax payer funded food in between his teeth)..very douchy !

 

-----signature-----

Paul posts are so dumb sometimes it makes my head hurt because it isn't used to having to deal with so much stupid.

Kind of the opposite here. We're adopting an OBE (outcome based education) model in our technology institute where they are trying to eliminate exams altogether. The focus is on 'authentic assessment' designs with an end result of not having any exam pressures on students.

On one hand, it's good that one bad day doesn't ruin a student's semester long work.

On the other hand, students (particularly this generation) don't really care about something unless they are being graded heavily on it. Also, because it's almost impossible to truly isolate work from an individual student in a structured environment without an exam, there will be some that get through a course that really should not.

I have very mixed feelings about it.

 

-----signature-----

.

 

-----signature-----

Politicians have really made a mess out of public education. The state of management in most school systems is just mind-numbingly awful.

 

-----signature-----

I do tech support in a school.

I am a fan of teachers and observe them working very hard.

Do you know what sucks now? It's not the teachers, it's the parents.

How do you evaluate students without actually trying to find out what they have learned and how much they know? Some kind of testing is necessary.

 

-----signature-----

I have bitched about this topic about a dozen times just that I can remember in the past year or so. NCLB is an absurdly ineffective and destructive program whose negative points FAR FAR outweigh the minimal benefits it provides.

I posted about how the same thing has happened in other schools I know about, and railed against it then.

This is absurd and ridiculous.

NCLB however is reactionary and while it is the government's fault, the root cause of this does not lie with the government (for a fkn wonder), nor does it lie with the teachers' union (for another fkn wonder), it lies with parents and a multitude of their "sins" propagated by the whole Oprah/Dr. Philâ„¢ mentality of social psychology that has been foisted on the American public for going on two generations now.

 

-----signature-----

I would argue that the reason students are so ill-prepared for life is because of the absence of art, literature, and music in their core curriculum. Brain stimulation happens on a variety of levels, and the human brain is not fully developed until ages 18-21 years of age. Cognitive and perceptual development is not solely based on how well one does in math and science but also includes how well one is taught how to think, how to appreciate, and how to extend oneself into multiple arenas. Entire regions of interest and development are literally lobbed off when music and art are eliminated from a student's educational experience. In terms of how well our country and its people function globally, we are poor at producing people who can innovate and problem-solve. We can't compete as long as we are producing entire cities whose adult population is functionally illiterate. I consider art and music vitally essential to how we adjunctively educate our children both in terms of stimulation and overall well-being. We can't afford not to.

 

-----signature-----