Tests have always showed students how much they have learned. Shouldn’t a minimal performance on the SAT and ACT be a requirement for high school graduation? Likewise for the GRE and other exams at the end of college education to get at learning within a student’s major? The same logic is embedded in admission tests to medical and law schools. Then come the exams that allow entrance into the professions.
To keep teachers and professors on their toes, however, they too should be regularly tested at least once a year. The program would cost almost nothing since the SAT and ACT testing and scoring are almost free already. Actually, government bureaucrats and other public servants would reap the same benefits of self-education and keeping mentally in shape. Rewards-and-promotion decisions would be boosted by yet another perspective. The intellectually or academically fit and unfit would be identified.
Parents and politicians and taxpayers should devote some of their leisure and entertainment time to studying what’s happening in American education, especially the problems. The nightly television news has nothing of importance, but it’s all free on the internet and every online cellphone. You might start by reading an article or two by conservative education expert Bruce Deitrick Price. His today’s American Thinker short article is “K–12: Are Low Test Scores a Problem?” While you’re at it, don’t forget that some of the best insights into the topic at hand are to be found in the Comments section, where writers are freer to state the truth as they see it.
One mother observes, for instance, that “My childrens’ 10th-grade AP Chemistry course was far more difficult than my freshman Engineering Chemistry course. That freshman course is how they used to cull the herd for the remainder of the BS degree–back when colleges cared what they turned-out.” Another commenter voices a common complaint: “The problem with the US public school system, as with most government run programs, there’s no accountability to results. No matter how poorly they perform they’re still rewarded with a bigger budget the next year. In fact you could say failure is rewarded. The schools with the lowest scores are rewarded with the biggest increases in spending based on democrats belief that the solution to every problem is to throw more tax dollars at it.”
Others might feel free to add a touch of political mockery: “it’s the future of the Democrat Party. If ya can’t import enough ignorant voters, manufacture them right here at home. When you disregard the foolishness of reading, articulation of thought and proficiency with numbers, they are quite up to speed on African American studies, LGBTQ indoctrination, the fallacy of Christianity and their God, the evil of capitalism, choosing whatever gender you feel like, that family is secondary to the Collective.”
Even commonsense solutions have a chance to be aired: “Parents need to stop turning over all the education of their children to the schools. I don’t mean home schooling. I mean after school, on the weekends, whenever you have time to teach your children what they are missing in schools.”
There’s always some commenter who charms the reader with humor: “Each child that shows up to take the test gets a 15 point ‘Participation Bonus.’ Walla! Massive improvement! Parents are happier! Administrators get to keep their jobs!”
The opinions can sometimes be enormously insightful: “Educators are no longer chasing excellence and merit. They have as an objective, egalitarian results for the entire student populations. So dumb it down until all groups represented are A students. It’s too stupid to consider but exactly what is happening. Our enemies could not be happier.”
Finally, others might even attempt to articulate a thought that has only been heard in conservation with a sympathetic friend: “Throwing money at the problem is not the answer. But they won’t say that because the educational system is set up to funnel money into the hands of Democrats and the leftist teachers unions, because those groups are fully onboard with the dumbing down of the population – and they are accomplishing those goals, so it ISN’T a failure to them.”
