@zenvelo I’m not personally as alarmist as the question sounds; I’m more concerned. I’m collecting things from around the news, blogs and from a conversation I had yesterday—and that’s the collection I came up with. I happened upon a string of articles yesterday—so wondered what others thought.
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To answer your question about the ACT— The ACT or SAT is run by a corporation called Educational Testing Services. They also created the GRE, TOEFL, Praxis and a few other tests. On their web site they say:
“ETS develops, administers and scores more than 50 million tests annually in more than 180 countries, at 9,000+ locations worldwide.”
Since the NCLB was passed, student testing has become a lucrative business and, yes, very uniformized. Since 2001 the ACT or SAT has become more and more required and is actually required for graduation by certain states. ACT scores are actually increasing every year—not because kids are smarter, no, but because they’re taught to the test and parents put down $600+ per session for test training/tutoring classes. To counteract that, there’s a list of universities that don’t require the ACT.
If that doesn’t give you the willies… Race to the Top might. It’s a school funding grant program schools are being encouraged to sign up for, but have to go through 30 pages of hoops to get the funding. Most of the hoops are rigorous data collection and documentation. (i.e. multiple choice testing, not actual thinking skills.) They also must expand their STEM teaching- no art, PE, or music is funded. The problem… it’s not really optional. They’re shutting down funding across the board, then if you want your funding back, you have to go through Race to the Top.
Take it from someone inside the system—education has become a scary place to be—true reasoning and thinking skills are no longer the goal. That part is not alarmist, but reality.