What the abandonment of standardized testing means …

And it has nothing to do with racial disparities but is an unwelcome and concrete example of the gross failure of the progressive and union-dominated public schools. There is no doubt in my mind that school administrators and teachers have fudged achievement tests for years by lowering standards and failing to test teachers for competency in teaching and subject-matter knowledge. Now they want to restrict the use of the major standardized tests.

The SAT (formerly known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test) is a standardized test that is widely used by college admissions as a screening device for incoming students.

  Is this the beginning of the end for the venerable SAT tests that plague high school students?  

Why progressives want to abandon standardized testing...

Over the years, the tests have been challenged and attacked as being biased by class, race, and culture in addition to studies that suggest only a vague correlation between test scores and college student achievements. All valid reasons to cast a skeptical eye on the test.

But there is foul play at hand. And, it has nothing to do with racial disparities but an example of the gross failure of the progressive and union-dominated public schools who have fudged the achievement tests for years by lowering graduation standards and failing to test teachers for competency in teaching and subject-matter knowledge. Educators who have no excuse – especially not the lack of funding – for the decades of functional illiterates who cannot master cursive writing, tell time without a digital watch, cannot research and write a paper without the internet, cut-and-paste, and spell-check, and cannot perform simple computations without using a calculator. It is almost the primary function of parents to keep a sufficient supply of batteries available.

Look at the English and mathematics scores of high school test-takers, and you will find they spell out the abysmal performance of today’s educators, especially in the inner cities.

Bottom line…

Public education has been both corrupted and diverted from its original purpose of preparing students to function in a socialized environment and to provide the individual with a sound framework of reading comprehension, numerical ability, critical thinking and a smattering of subject-matter knowledge to allow them to earn a living or benefit from the advanced education needed to succeed in more challenging professions.

Now it is merely to indoctrinate students into Marxism and produce compliant population units known as social justice warriors. Everything is filtered through the progressive’s ideology where political correctness, multiculturalism, moral equivalency, and the support of the Democrat Party are a given.

Some schools have become exercises in babysitting, and some instructors are so afraid of their students and their inability to maintain classroom discipline that they simply go through the motions. The school has accreted the power to feed students, initiate criminal referrals without consequences, and order up birth control and abortions without a parent’s knowledge or consent. Parents often have little to say about anything, and the PTA has become a fundraising operation.

Tenure and unwarranted other perks, privileges are demanded by corrupt unions.

Teaching is no longer a profession but an occupation.

Free speech, academic freedom are artifacts of a bygone era as contempt for conventional thought is subverted by radical teachers on a single-party campus.

Schools are one-party campuses that exhibit a concentration of radical conformity where dysfunctional education subverts history, civics, and the critical thinking ability necessary for students and future adults to understand when they are being bamboozled.

It is almost as if school tuition acts as an involuntary contribution to progressive socialist democrats.

We need to keep the tests, for no matter how flawed; they tell parents that their politicians and school boards are betraying them.

If the democrats were sincere about education, they would immediately enact a voucher system and force schools to compete for students based on excellence. Providing for natural integration by not restricting students to poor-performing local schools. It is time someone told the unions that they do not own the students.

We are so screwed.

-- steve