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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that disagrees with me: yes, schools should teach a general understanding, rather than drilling a narrow toolbox that works on one specific test. But then:

- As I said above, you would need to cite which test question are game-able, and which encourage this narrow teaching, which critics never do.

- If the problem is that teachers try to satisfy this goal by trying to game the tests, then the problem is with this way of teaching, not the tests per se.

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"From September until Christmas vacation, [Brookside] was like any school you would imagine. Then, once they got back from Christmas break, for the next nine weeks until testing began, it was a different animal. What they did was drop their curriculum, drop their texts, and instead study exclusively from a standardized-test prep book. Kids weren't getting a liberal arts education, but prepping to a very narrowly drawn standardized test in primarily language arts and math. Because they were interested in passing the test more than anything else, for that 22 percent of the school year, they taught primarily to the broad middle section of kids that were going to pass. Plus, the school went and reached out to those kids who they thought were on the cusp of possibly passing. So who gets left out? The kids at the bottom and the kids at the top." [0]

It's not the tests per se, but it's what is put on the line. Raises, funding, evaluations, keeping your job - these are all disincentives to well-rounded education. Please don't make me quote the plethora of studies that show how important arts, literature, and the sciences are to primary education. Completely stopping studying these things for half the school year is bad.

So it doesn't matter if the tests are filled with good-to-know knowledge - they're positioned to dis-incentivize and devalue anything that isn't math, language arts, and a narrow reading of how to structure an essay.

[0] http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2013/04/11/why-excess...

Do you (A) oppose standardised testing in general, or (B) just object to (i) the way the test results are used as incentives/whatever, and (ii) think they test too narrow a set of subjects, or (C) something else?

You raise an objection to raises and funding being tied to test outcomes. Why would this be bad? Sure, if the tests are testing the wrong things, then we should fix the tests. But, it's not impossible to measure educational outcomes. Why should teachers continued employment, and pay, not reflect how well they are measured to be doing, at the thing they are paid to do?

The most profitable companies on earth got their by having a time horizon of longer than 8 months . there are critically important things that you can't measure on a multiple choice test

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