OK. Obama/Duncan/Gates School "Reform" Model: The results Are IN !!! Today's NYT: P. A1

[jeff47]

57. You're still missing the central point

Tests don't work.

Let's say you wanted to evaluate the performance of a few gigabit Ethernet chips. So you write a program to upload a huge chunk of data, boot up some computers with the various chips to test, and measure the time it takes to upload the data.

You didn't measure the performance of those chips.

The speed at which your upload occurred also depended on the operating system's ability to feed data to the chip, which depended on the CPU, the northbridge, the RAM, the hard disk, the SATA bus, the southbridge and so on.

So the result of your test will grade some chips poorly when it's not the Ethernet chip that is the bottleneck - a whole lot of manufacturers plug the Ethernet chip into the PCI bus, and the PCI bus doesn't have the bandwith for full gigabit. Gigabit Ethernet needs to be plugged into something faster, like PCI Express.

It's the same with kids. Any test evaluates far more than the subject area of the test. As such, it's not possible to design a test which effectively evaluates the student in that subject.

But I don't believe, and you don't provide any reason to believe, that the sort of testing that is being used in the class room is being designed by "random people off the street" rather than educators and psychologist who are competent to do so.

The random people off the street are forcing there to be a test. They don't write that test, but that doesn't matter. They're forcing teachers to test because they don't understand teaching. And they falsely believe that tests work.

If you are able to get the right answer to a math problem you have never encountered before, and you can do this over and over for a wide variety of such problems, it seems reasonable that you do indeed understand math.

People are not deterministic.

Kid doesn't get breakfast that morning - Mom lost her job a week ago, and they're out of food. Kid does poorly on the test. You system calls them dumb instead of calling them hungry.