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I enjoyed that sentence. Seriously!

That said, I feel as if what you just wrote applies much too much to the whole world. My personal view is that the percentage of people who think deeply enough about things to question everything they have been TOLD is true depressingly low.

Yesterday I looked at some samples from the grade 4 "reading" test. It was extremely poor as a test, and my impression was that whoever patched this together could not have been a well trained teacher. Today I read that it was created by a corporation. I also read a union rep saying the tests were "not worth the paper they were written on", which to my mind suggests that educationally they were unsound.

Yesterday I read several of the texts (reading material) and the questions that students needed to answer. The first one was supposedly scientific, on animals and the environment. It was poorly written as a piece of writing. It was also poorly designed as a test. It is as if somebody was given a list of gr. 4 vocabulary, and strung them together into paragraphs. It was very hard to follow the train of thought of the writer, or the ideas the writer was trying to develop. That is because the writer was not developing anything. If a student of mine wrote such an article, I would tell that student to try again and put some planning into it.

The questions themselves did not reflect reading comprehension. The best way to answer them was to ditch the article, use common sense, and guess what kind of answer was probably wanted. It was possible for the child to draw a different conclusion, and choose a different answer which would have been marked "wrong" when that child might have perfectly understood the article.

Any child who thinks literally, children with Aspergers, or children coming from another culture, would have been thrown by this material. These children might be perfectly capable of reading the words, but would not be able to answer the questions. Thus an assessment that is supposed to reflect how well the students overall are learning to read, would actually reflect how poorly the material was.

I see no purpose being served by these things. At the same time they waste time, lead to distortions, and may be used for political purposes that have nothing to do with education. These may be the reasons that the teachers are against them.

As a side note, British Columbia has had the reputation as being THE most enlightened system in Canada. The rule of thumb was, "The further west you go, the better it gets." If that is true, I hope the politicians out there don't destroy something good.

Is there even a remote possibility that your the students in your studio is not a representative random sampling of public school students across the state?

The research reported by popular author Gladwell says this is very dependent on the amount of stimulation the child gets during the off season.

Disadvantaged kids and those from more affluent backgrounds learned at close to the same rates during the school year.

But the kids from the advantaged backgrounds (not just wealthier, but parents with time and interests who provide opportunities) continued to progress slowly during vacation, while the disadvantaged kids stagnated or regressed.

Your daughter's progress proves you were dong the right things, but applied across the board this would be disastrous. There are lots of households with no reading material, no music, no soccer camp or dance lessons, maybe even parents who can't read or write, if there are parents at all.

+1!! I think critical thinking is one of the casualties of this era of testing and cramming. Critical thinking takes time to teach and nurture. Also, often there is no right or wrong answer so it's not easy to test in a multiple choice scenario. When all you have to choose from are answers already provided, not much creativity in devising your own answer is required.

If we could teach critical thinking well, much of the rest would follow. However, the US is one of the most heavily religious countries, certainly the most religious of the modern industrial world, and there is a great fear that critical thinking if accidentally applied to religion would produce unpredictable results.

I had a seminar once with a visiting European medical doctor. One of his interesting off topic comments was that he thought the multiple choice test had destroyed American education. It encourages you to guess, and to him guessing was equivalent to lying. He said if he had guessed/lied on a test he would have been thrown out of university as an integrity issue, just like any other form of cheating. It was a new slant to me; I'd never thought of multiple choice that way. He does have a point.

I went through 4 years of engineering classes with almost no multiple choice tests. You had to solve problems and show your work. It must have been enormously difficult to grade but grad assistants are cheap labor.

Correlation does not equal causation. I'm a very religious person and am surprised that you blame religions for the lack of critical thinking. Christianity in particular was at the forefront of education in recent eras, and even today they are of the vast majority who go out into 3rd world countries and build schools and teach the people how to make wells and improve the lives of their people.

I do not think it is fair for you to dump the lack of critical thinking into the laps of those who have a faith in something without any proof of your assertion.

I blame UNQUESTIONED acceptance of ORANIZED religion, what it teaches, as part of the problem. A huge problem.

But I would not paint all relgious people as lacking in ability in critical thinking. That's too general. It is unfair.

Although I am not religious, rather anti-religion (organized relgion), I agree with you.

I hope this thread does not turn into a flame-war between people "of faith" and "religiosity supporters".

My own "dog in this fight" had to do with those who question vs those who do not. There are people who were profoundly suspicious of all religion, outspoken atheiests, who later came to believe in one religion or another with great passion.

CS Lewis is one of them. There are others.

So for the record my mind stays open!

What you're objecting to bears no resemblance to what I said.

I'll return later when the connection is faster and amplify.

I think it is just that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence :-)

If the argument comes down to the quality of test, it would be easy. However, it is not the point. Even the test is the perfect, the union still doesn't want it. The point is that it doesn't want anything that can be used to measure a teacher or a school.

No, that is not what it just is. We examined what various provinces were doing. there were specifics.

First off, one does not "measure" a teacher or school through such tests. Secondly, the tests I saw were extremely poor.

Unfortunately that's precisely what is happening here. It's a while since I've been in the public school system here in Australia, but I'd like to pick up on this point, because it's the one the teachers' unions here are emphasising in their campaign against the increasing use of standardised testing.

The main concerns of the teachers' unions where I am seem to be that tests are imposed by governments seeking to score cheap political points. They're trying to show they're doing something about education (something apart from actually providing adequate funding, that is...), and tapping into some fear that things aren't as good as they were in the good old days when we recited our tables and chanted our spelling lists. (In my "good old days" in the 1950s I was in a class of 50+ children, about a third of them recent post-war migrants from European countries, who had little or no English. I managed to swim, but I'm sure many others did sink.)

And governments here are using the results for their own ends, even though they've said they won't. We now have a website which lists the results from all the schools so that parents can take a superficial glance and decide which schools are "best", without taking into account any of the factors that influence these results. When schools get a bad reputation so do the students in them, which has an impact on their employment opportunities.

These results are also used to downplay the efforts of teachers, who are already doing so much with so little. No one is measuring how much some child from a disadvantaged background has improved due to the efforts of a skilled, experienced and dedicated teacher; they simply look at the raw score and decide the child is underachieving. Therefore we have to improve teaching standards. There's the implication that we need these tests because teachers have been slacking. As if teachers hadn't always used testing and evaluation to determine how to proceed with individuals in their classes!

And because so much (including funding) is riding on the results, schools are pressured to "teach to the test". It's pretty depressing for the teachers I know to be told how to teach by officals and politicians who for the most part have no clue, and think any little populist catch-cry is some wonderful educational breakthrough that they've just thought of and which will save their political future.

Sorry, I got a little carried away.

Anyone who actually teaches will understand, while those who don't risk being fooled. I have a choice of saying a lot, or almost nothing, and it's probably better to say less.

I think that's rather obvious. If the parents care enough that their kids take piano lessons, chances are the kids grew up in a nurturing family and thus won't fail standardized tests miserably.

As for the rest of the thread, I'm not comfortable doing away with testing altogether, because I've witnessed enough bad teaching and really, really bad teachers who aren't fired because the union stood in the way. One of the principals I worked for was rather progressive, and he actively scraped away the union's power (it also helped that the district's union was rather weak and lawyer-less).

The problem here in California is not the endless testing. It is really about the way districts are drawn up and the way (some) unions wield almost an unlimited amount of power to protect awful teachers. The more I think about it, the more depressing it gets.

That being said, I still champion the American public education system over some tracking gunk in Europe or the really, really endless testing in Asia. Some parts of Asia are trying to get rid of the endless testing.

CS Lewis is perhaps not the best example. He was a lukewarm Christian who later became fervent. There are better examples, but they all share a common factor. They became religious after an emotional event rather than application of critical thinking. There are claims for the latter, but none of them stand up to examination. CS Lewis is part of my faith tradition - I'm Episcopal.

I do not think religion has hindered teaching critical thinking in general. Teaching critical thinking as its own entity rather than a routine part of science class, e.g., is a relatively new idea. The fundamentalist ends of most religions are suspicious and hostile to education in general, while the more moderate ends have ended up with excellent educational systems and preserved large bodies of knowledge through some dark ages.

Religion inherently requires suspension of critical thinking. It wouldn't be a religion if it didn't require belief in supernatural actions without evidence, it would just be a social club. Most people who value critical thinking but retain faith, like myself and religious scientists, simply compartmentalize. We suspend critical thinking at the door of the church, to the extent possible, and work to turn it back on after the last Amen.

If critical thinking were taught really well, it would be a threat to some powerful interests. Religion is but one, and probably not the most important one. Alternative medicine would disappear, and that's a multi-billion dollar industry. All sorts of scams would become more difficult. And politics? don't get me started! (sequester means I take one unpaid day off per week, a 20% cut in my salary. Not exactly easy with two kids in college.)

I think CS Lewis would have called himself an atheist in the period before his conversion (and I think he calls it that in Surprised by Joy, doesn't he? Not 100% sure - it's a while since I read it) even though he'd grown up in the Church of England. Well, Church of Ireland actually.

Same here in BC, the only difference is that the teachers union here are very very strong, teachers in the public school system are well paid, and it is impossible to get rid of a rotten teacher, period.

In this province students takes 2 standardized testing in the first 9 years of school, and Fraser Institute, an independent think tank organization that interprets the result, does take average family income into the consideration. I really don't think testing at this frequency affects students learning. And I do think parents deserve some transparency.

As AZNpiano said, the testing is a double edged sword, it has it's problems, but it is still needed. Medicine has side effects, but it saves life.

And that is the problem. The sample tests that I saw were flawed and would not reflect much about reading ability. It does not give any information. Do the people in that institute have a background in education? Do you know? Actually I think I'll try to find out. I imagine that since it's your province, you have already tried to do so.

http://www.fraserinstitute.org/

I see a header "A free and prosperous world through choice, markets, and responsibility". That gives me the impression that their interest is financial. In fact, they do research in a whole pile of fields. The person heading the educational research part has a degree in commerce.

I second wholeheartedly Keystring's opposition to standardized testing. In France, for many years there has been talk of introducing these kinds of things in the national grade school system, associated with the idea of measuring the profitability of teachers who are all, one might think, slackers. Fortunately it has been kept at bay, and here's to hoping that it will continue to be.

Yes, CS Lewis most definitely called himself an atheist before his conversion.