Anyone else bristling over big industry’s attempts to usurp public education?

If you don’t like the way Government schools are run, then support a school voucher program, which will allow parents to decide where their kids go to school. Better schools will have more students, and parents will be able to choose what kind of school they wish to send their kids to, whether it focuses on college prep, industry-prep, arts, or whatever.

The sooner the government gets out of the schooling business, the better.

Standardized testing is a necessary evil. Without it, there is practically no common yardstick with which to asses students from different schools.

It would be unfair for hardworking students from one challenging school to be beaten by another simply because that other kid had a school rampant with grade inflation and easy classes.

It’s not true that standardized testing doesn’t benefit students. In my school, our advanced classes are serious- everyone either gets a 4 or a 5 on the AP exam. In the same classes at other schools, hardly anyone ever cracks a 3. I’m glad that those exams exist so they can show to colleges that an A in my class isn’t the same thing as an A in another.

You people aren’t reading the papers: Bill Gates, Google and AT&T are all clamoring to make local schools concentrate on training engineers for their industries. And many school systems are caving in to the pressure. No one needs Algebra to survive, but the hi-tech industry does.

And when did a school ever adjust a student’s learning experience because of how he or she did on a standardized test? And it’s naive to think that colleges actually compare test scores among different schools to evaluate the value of a given GPA.

Giving all the attention to the A students and expecting everyone live up to their standard is bogus. I notice all the standards are set by ivory towered college graduate school board members and business owners, not the rank and file in society.

Meeting educational requirements was always the idea of public education. Standardized testing is one measuring stick to evaluate a student’s status against those goals. Industry does not dictate curriculum. Unfortunately, curriculum (and it is poor in some cases) is dictated by the school boards and the federal government. You are indeed alone in the wilderness, as you put it. Did the asker by any chance fail these standardized tests?