marichiko

I have to agree with Clodfobble. The best teachers just teach the subject, and don't worry about teaching to the test. Those standardized tests were around way back in the stone ages when I was still a kid. The teacher would tell us that we were going to have a standardized test that wouldn't effect our grade and to do our best on it. I actually sort of liked taking them since the pressure was off about a grade and they were a break in the routine.

I think too many standardized tests throughout the year take away from time that could be spent learning. Making such testing mandatory on a national level would not be something I'd favor.

We will get a higher quality of education in this country when this country begins to respect education. Right now it doesn't. Teaching is a low paying profession because we don't respect the work that teachers do. Schools need to be equally funded across the board.

WARNING: Marichiko is now going to climb up on her soap box:

As with any country, America's greatest resource is her people. The US cannot afford to continue with what amounts to a policy of complacency and indifference regarding the education and well-being of its young.
In the January/Feburary Atlantic Monthly, Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong discuss current global economic trends and the implications of these trends for workers in the United States. Cohen and Delong note that workers will have to better educated than ever before if the US is to retain its current level of economic prosperity. White collar workers will be competing with workers who will do the same job for a tenth of the pay in countries like India. At the minimum, an education at a state University will be crucial in order to hang on to a white collar job in this country in the coming years.

In a less complex world, Abe Lincoln could study a book by firelight and rise to become President of the United States. Now, Lincoln would be lucky to have a career as a bus boy with such a background.

In today's United States, while all men may be created equal, they are not raised equal. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, more than one third of children in the US currently live in poverty, and 45 percent of kindergartners live in low-income families.

The pattern of academic test scores is striking and consistent: children in families whose incomes fall below 200 percent of Federal poverty lines are well below average on their reading, math, and general knowledge test scores compared to the well-above-average scores of children living in families with incomes over 300 percent of Federal poverty lines ($55,200 for a family of four). Only 16 percent of the children in officially poor families but 50 percent of the children from the most affluent families scored in the same upper range.

Schools with high proportions of low-income children have higher numbers of inexperienced teachers, fewer computers, less Internet access, and larger class sizes than schools with lower proportions of low-income children. Thus, the children who stand to gain the most from quality schools often do not have access to them. Source

Our children are our future, and this country is throwing a significant part of its future away. If the future global economy will favor those with an education from MIT, it will delegate to the human refuse pile those who have a high school diploma from an inner city school in the Bronx or a poor rural area in far western Colorado.

A recent survey of western nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows the US lagging number 16 in place for social spending on its children. We take top honors, however, among industrialized nations for the percentage of our children living in poverty. Even the children of Spain and strife torn Ireland are better off than those living in the US.

We are on a direct collision course for economic disaster. It would require no revolution to avoid it. Here is a direct quote from the above study, "The other 15 countries in the OECD survey face similar global conditions with respect to trade, investment, technology, the environment, and other factors that shape economic opportunities. The paucity of social expenditures addressing high poverty rates in the United States is not due to a lack of resources — high per capita income and high productivity make it possible for the United States to afford much greater social welfare spending. Moreover, other OECD countries that spend more on both poverty reduction and family-friendly policies have done so while maintaining competitive rates of productivity and income growth."

If we allow the current shortsighted policies on the part of the US toward our own to continue, we and our children will pay an increasingly stiff price. I hope that for the sake of our people, our nation will finally wake up before it's too late.