While standardized testing is a menace, it's right at home in a system so standardized that 8 year-olds spend all day only with other 8 year-olds. The biggest change occurred not under Reagan, but in the years after Sputnik, when panic over "falling behind" the Soviets in the space race inspired the federal government to take a much bigg…
While standardized testing is a menace, it's right at home in a system so standardized that 8 year-olds spend all day only with other 8 year-olds. The biggest change occurred not under Reagan, but in the years after Sputnik, when panic over "falling behind" the Soviets in the space race inspired the federal government to take a much bigger role in education. The feds, along with various think tanks that knew nothing about children or how they learn, decided that a programmatic approach, such as was used by NASA, was the way to improve math and science instruction. Frank Smith details the disaster of this change of course in "Insult to Intelligence: The Bureaucratic Invasion of Our Classrooms." Previously, instruction had been relatively more holistic and natural, but now kids were obligated to do truly brain dead worksheets, which just happened to be produced by the new Educational-Industrial Complex (think large publishers and corporations like IBM). Textbooks had always been mind-numbing, but now programmatic instruction confused and confounded children, who came to be seen as morons who could required intensely dumbed-down everything. Again, standardized testing is nothing more than a brain dead cash cow, but it is the one-size-fits-all, artificial and harmful programmatic instruction and curriculum, and the forced march of all children through it on an adult-controlled timetable, that put the nail in the coffin of public education.
All true, but it was Reagan who formalized it into law—literally. Until then, it was mostly implemented at the school board level as the salespeople convinced them education wasn't about teaching people to think but preparing them for careers. They used the "businesses aren't getting capable workers" line, and since most school boards at that time comprised local business owners, it worked perfectly.
It hardly mattered to me. I was subjected to a brain-dead series of inane readings with questions put out by IBM long before Reagan came to office. I’d say the damage was done by the 1970s.
As were we all, but back then the federal and state funding for our schools weren't totally dependent not only on the results of those tests but that they improve by a designated amount every year. That's the difference that set in post-Education Reform™.
While standardized testing is a menace, it's right at home in a system so standardized that 8 year-olds spend all day only with other 8 year-olds. The biggest change occurred not under Reagan, but in the years after Sputnik, when panic over "falling behind" the Soviets in the space race inspired the federal government to take a much bigger role in education. The feds, along with various think tanks that knew nothing about children or how they learn, decided that a programmatic approach, such as was used by NASA, was the way to improve math and science instruction. Frank Smith details the disaster of this change of course in "Insult to Intelligence: The Bureaucratic Invasion of Our Classrooms." Previously, instruction had been relatively more holistic and natural, but now kids were obligated to do truly brain dead worksheets, which just happened to be produced by the new Educational-Industrial Complex (think large publishers and corporations like IBM). Textbooks had always been mind-numbing, but now programmatic instruction confused and confounded children, who came to be seen as morons who could required intensely dumbed-down everything. Again, standardized testing is nothing more than a brain dead cash cow, but it is the one-size-fits-all, artificial and harmful programmatic instruction and curriculum, and the forced march of all children through it on an adult-controlled timetable, that put the nail in the coffin of public education.
All true, but it was Reagan who formalized it into law—literally. Until then, it was mostly implemented at the school board level as the salespeople convinced them education wasn't about teaching people to think but preparing them for careers. They used the "businesses aren't getting capable workers" line, and since most school boards at that time comprised local business owners, it worked perfectly.
It hardly mattered to me. I was subjected to a brain-dead series of inane readings with questions put out by IBM long before Reagan came to office. I’d say the damage was done by the 1970s.
As were we all, but back then the federal and state funding for our schools weren't totally dependent not only on the results of those tests but that they improve by a designated amount every year. That's the difference that set in post-Education Reform™.