SATs

[were_gopher]

Not a good morning.  It's the last day of SATs and the Bunny had to be half dragged to school crying that she didn't want to go.  Silly girl never told us about it or how worried she was about the whole thing. 

Personally I think it's stupid to put them through this at such a young age but thats what you get when government thinks it can tell experts how to do their job.

Lots of attention and cuddles for the weekend I think.

Comments

[hrrunka]

I caught the first half (or so) of Woman's Hour on Radio 4 this morning. It was dissecting two bits of government overlord-ing; SATs and some new child-minder legislation. The politicians go on about how good the ideas are and that they're not supposed to be a burden, but to help [insert group you want to please here]. The poor bods at the sharp end, however, tell a different story...

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

One of the things about the testing is that it gives the schools some evidence to strike back with at the politicians.

As in, "We get a lot of disadvantaged kids in this school--look at these test results--and we need more resources to get good results for the pupils leaving."

My brother was in that line of work when he worked at Leeds University in the late Eighties: it was a very different system, and voluntary. Schools would volunteer because the assessment gave them evidence of where the problems were.

Now it's all about government benchmarks, and a totally different game. As he said after the time he visited the Aviary Place slanshack, kids from a house with that many books are always going to break the tests.

[hrrunka]

Aye. The game shifted when they started using the SAT results to compile the school league tables. Now the SATs are seen as a test of the school...

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

poor kiddo, and the kicker is that the way the system is set up now, the results are basically meaningless with regards to proving what she knows and is capable of...apart from how good she is at doing the tests!

what they are now is a method to grade the schools at teaching how to do the tests, which is used to determine the degree of funding said school receives. which the schools know and thus make an extra effort to teach the kids how to pass the tests.[often to the point of telling them the answers]... and this invalidating the results, preventing anything meaningful from being concluded about the kids or the school.

A pointless, self perpetuating system that stresses out the kids,and wastes resources and time that could be spent teaching something useful instead...

but then what can you expect when they copy the american education system!