Thursday, September 20, 2007

Die Standardized Tests!

You really appreciate the stress relieving power of knitting when you have to take a three day long test. It's not like we don't take enough tests already- we take multiple tests a week at my school, sometimes in the same subject. Now they want us to take the ISTEPs to battle for funding. The only problem is that my school DOESN'T GET ANY FUNDING. WE ARE CATHOLIC! Now , since I passed the ISTEPs , I'm headed for a barrage of college qualifying exams and AP tests. Not that the state or the government cares. The problem with tests is that you don't improve when you take them. A test shows what you DON'T know. If the government wants to improve the test scores, its going to be by getting the people who take the tests to care, not by getting the teachers and principals to care. Funneling money into education is not going to improve anything, except SOME people's paychecks. You want a better America? Try making healthy food cheaper than junk food so we won't be fat, filtering emissions so we'll breathe healthy, make it illegal to drop out of school for people under 18, reward kids with good grades, stop the pointless war on terror (we came back from Korea and Vietnam, and they're alright now), and stop making us pay so much in taxes! That would make our world a lot better. Just make gas prices go down first.

1 comment:

Genuine-Lye said...

I think that dropping out of school shouldn't be prevented by making it crime, that would simply make more jobs for people to go around enforcing it, more pointless tests, pressure, etc. I think that people wouldn't drop out of school so much if schools made learning more relevant to real life situations. I think schools refuse to change from habit--only 1% of people go on to use algebra in their profession, and most of those are people who go on to teach math! I think algebra should be taught, but made relevant and real. Anyway, interesting, thought provoking post.