Quote:
Originally Posted by TheMercenary
Another Fine example of Government over reach.
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How is setting guidelines for their OWN TEST possibly overreach? You can disagree with it without it being overreach, you know. If they were telling the public not to use those words, that would be one thing. They are announcing that they will no longer use those words.
as for the motion itself, I support it. It seems a little silly to me to ban, say, birthdays, but fair's fair. There is clearly something broken about our standardised testing system. Minorities and less wealthy Americans consistently score worse on standardised tests even when all other variables are accounted for. "Standard" shouldn't mean "for middle class white people" - it should mean a test calibrated to be accessible to ALL students equally, to asses ONLY their academic progress and potential, not their socioeconomic group or anything else. Without standardised testing, it's too easy for students to be learning nothing at all, without oversight institutions being able to assess why, how, and who. But so far, almost all standardised testing systems used on a wide scale work badly for almost everybody and even worse for the rest.
Why do minorities score worse? Is it the academics, the questions, the cultural factors, what? I think that the facts indicate that ONE of MANY factors involved is that structural biases and flawed assumptions have led to a standardisation system that unfairly adds a cultural dimension to exams that shouldn't be culturally affected. The same way that an IQ test that only tests maths can leave behind people who are intelligent without being mathematical, or a blood pressure exam that only gave your diastolic pressure would leave you blind to systolic issues, an "academic" test that picks a "standard" that does not apply to some of the population, those parts of the population will not be accurately examined and assessed.
So: solve it! how can we effectively ensure that all students are meeting basic educational benchmarks, in a way that provides oversight of failed teachers, in a way that does not EITHER hold back from the curriculum being taught (instead of teaching to the test) OR unfairly introduce limiting or handicapping non-academic factors on the assessed?
I think that standardised testing in some form is REQUIRED for a schooling system that works. Some teachers just suck - its not always the students' fault when they don't perform well. There has to be a way to separate out bad teachers from bad classes. We just haven't written an effective test yet. This might be a step in the right direction, to remove at least a few potential handicaps from the potentially-culturally-biased or overly normative in a way that detracts from those outside the norm.
I dunno how many of you had modern standardised tests in school. Usually at least half of the tests are short stories, persuasive nonfiction, academic nonfiction, and historical nonfiction articles, followed by multiple-choice questions on the piece. If one of the sections was about Rap, or sports, or computers, and you had neither the experience nor the interest to adequately process, parse, understand, and respond to the article, that would be a terrifically unfair thing to test you on, when your language skills are what is being assessed.
edit: also note how many of the words on the list are things potentially triggering to New York City public school students suffering from ptsd, abuse, neglect, or poverty. If you're a 10-year-old hard-knocks impoverished inner-city kid suffering from abuse or neglect, living with violence and a lack of safety at or near home or in your neighborhood, the last thing you need is for your stupid awful test in the hot stuffy classroom to trigger potentially extreme emotional responses. Some people can shrug that kind of "twinge" off - some can't, so well, and when they soldier on and keep taking the test, their scores are negatively affected.
Please, opponents of this move... read all of that. I know, tl;dl, but really - respond to it. I'm just throwing out the logic that makes sense to me - i'm really curious what the response to those concerns is, and how better to deal with them.