"The testing fetish is a response to generations of kids who can't think taught by teachers who said "we're teaching kids how to think"."

Funny, I thought it was driven by too many politicians who'd taken management 101 and learned to "measure everything". Do you have a cite? (Honestly wondering).

The only way to administer tests at scale is with multiple choice and number 2 pencils. The easiest way to pass a multiple choice test is to memorize a bunch of crap and not bother thinking.

I'm not saying that all testing should be abolished, but it's pretty clear that testing is insufficient -- any real learning-to-think that goes on with a testing-dominated system is going to be the product of teachers going above and beyond, and totally unmeasurable so those teachers will never be rewarded (and probably punished).

"The only way to administer tests at scale is with multiple choice and number 2 pencils"

I think that there's an alternate way, but it comes at a cost: we have to de-standardize the tests. Here's how I see it playing out.

Jill is an eighth grade match teacher with thirty students in her class. When testing time comes around, she writes an exam for the state which she feels represents what an eighth grade math student should know. She sends a copy of the exam to the state. In return, she receives thirty different exams from the state, each written by a different teacher and assigned to exactly one of her students. She distributes the tests assigned to each student. At the end of testing, she sends back the completed exams. In return, the state sends her thirty answers to her exams, which she grades as she sees fit. Finally, she sends her grades in to the state.

The state then looks at how Jill's student performed on the assorted exams that they were given. The raw score isn't at issue, but rather how they performed compared to the other students who took that specific exam (e.g. how many standard deviations that they were above or below the mean). If most of her students scored above average, we're happy. If most of her students were below average, we question why.

Since the teachers don't know what will be on the test, they can't coach the students to memorize answers. Thus, the teachers who teach the students to think and handle unfamiliar situations will be rated higher by the test than students who simply regurgitate what their teacher taught them.

> I think that there's an alternate way, but it comes at a cost: we have to de-standardize the tests.

Why do you think that "standardized test" means "same questions for everyone"?

Also, we're actually not that interested in the score at the end of the year but in the difference between what the kids could do at the beginning and end of the year.

That's kind of brilliant, although I could see it being a clusterfuck in actual implementation, 30 isn't enough per-test to get meaningful statistics for one thing.

It also involves a total lack of control from the top-down, so it'd probably be resisted pretty strongly. I really like the basic idea, though.

>> "The testing fetish is a response to generations of kids who can't think taught by teachers who said "we're teaching kids how to think"."

> Funny, I thought it was driven by too many politicians who'd taken management 101 and learned to "measure everything". Do you have a cite? (Honestly wondering).

You haven't seen the "Asian kids are doing better" and "schools are failing" stuff? Really?

> The easiest way to pass a multiple choice test is to memorize a bunch of crap and not bother thinking.

How would "memorize a bunch of crap" work for an algebra test? Unless "crap" means "rules of algebra and how to apply them"....

How about three examples of this "learning to think" that can't be measured with a test? (Skill in playing a musical instrument is arguably one, but mostly at the extremes. However, ranking Carlos Santana vs Jeff Beck isn't the problem.)

I suspect that your definition of "test" is too limited, which says more about you than it does about testing.