20-fold increase in standardized testing coming with Gates Foundation's "Common Core":

[MadHound]

23. Sorry, I wasn't making myself clear,

I was discounting the study that somehow "proves" that class size doesn't matter. There are decades of academic research that show that class size indeed effects learning.

There are also decades of research that show that many students, while intelligent and great students, simply don't do well on standardized tests, especially fill in the bubble tests. That is not how they learn, that is not how they should be assessed. For these students, they need to do portfolios, presentations, papers and other forms of assessment in order to truly show what they know.

Furthermore, these "high stakes" tests aren't high stakes for most students. For instance, in the state where I teach, the MAP test are our high stakes test. They take a week. They are high stakes for the teacher, the school, and the district. But they aren't high stakes for the student. They get no grade, if they fail, they still go on to the next grade, the students have no skin in the game. So throughout the state there are lots of students who walk into these tests, fill out the bubbles in any random pattern they choose, and they're done. They simply don't care. Thus, the scores get skewed, the teachers, schools and districts get skewed.

That's a huge part of the problem facing education, the simple fact that non-professionals are making these huge decisions for our eduction system with little or no input from actual educators. Gates is no more qualified to make education decisions than I'm qualified to fly a space shuttle. We wouldn't allow a software engineer make major decisions about a surgery, why are we allowing them, and all kinds of other non-educators, make vital decisions regarding education?