Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The Pleasures Of 'Teaching To the Test'

I think that many of those patents either belong to foreign companies, or have inventors in America that were educated overseas. For example, Sergey Brin was born in Russia.

I agree-- but then we must also exclude foreign patents when THOSE individuals were educated overseas, as well.

In many STEM fields, relatively few Americans are educated abroad, and traditionally, a large number of the elite undergraduates from other nations are educated in the US.

When fully 2/3rd of a graduate program are here on educational visas, then it becomes quite difficult to tease apart just what is "theirs" and what is "ours."

Except, of course, for the fact that their students are somehow superior to so many of ours even though they are usually working ESL, at best.

And, um-- I could be quite wrong about this, but using Sergey Brin as an example of a foreign immigrant might not be the best idea, since he's got some pretty illustrious American institutions in his CV.

Now, what Larry Page and Sergy Brin both do have in common... is parents who are part of the intelligentsia... the Professoriate, at any rate. Clearly growing up in an environment that values education and provides appropriate opportunities (not limited by formal schooling and/or age) seems to be an important factor; this is also something that Bill Gates seems to have been raised with.


It's not at all clear that we'd have MORE people like them if only we offered more standardized testing, however.

I just want to say that I am loving this discussion. good points...

You wrote exactly what I had in mind, but I wrote it poorly above.


You get people like Sergey's parents coming to America as long as America remains a land of opportunity for immigrants. Standardized testing has no positive or negative effect on that.

Does standardized testing improve education for students in the US? Not by itself, but a well constructed test can measure how well someone has learned the material being tested. Measurement is highly useful, as it can provide insight about what is working and not working. In that sense, I think standardized tests are just as useful in great education systems as they are in ones that need improvement.

Last I looked, the copyright system doesn't solely benefit inventors or those who patent products. It benefits artists as well. In fact, Charles Dickens helped to push for the international copyright system to protect his work.

Ravitch's point, I think, is that the standardized test scores do squat for a country's creativity and ingenuity. There, I would agree with her. The American Revolution and Industrial Revolution started in MA and RI (not in NY, NJ, VA or elsewhere in the colonies) for a reason. Ideas.

Read her latest blog - http://dianeravitch.net/ which was written today. She asks whether Common Core will contribute to creativity or not. I think not. Many public schools have slashed art, music, gym, etc. A recipe for disaster, imo.

Bill Gates and MS and the big educational publishing/testing firms are touting standardized testing because it benefits them. It's good business. If schools keep Windows operating systems or MS, then schools continue being reliant/dependent on them and students will likely continue to use their products as future customers. Few question the status quo.

Of course, I'd also suggest looking at Scotland as an illustrative example of how a poor, sparsely populated country put value in educating its citizens. Scotland has been host to much inventiveness and for creating the basic ideas and institutions of modern life (Bell, Adam Smith, David Hume, James Watt, Carnegie, Arthur Conan Doyle, JK Rowling, etc.) - if we're keeping score!

I agree. All the secondary school exit exams in other OECD countries are standardized: everyone takes the same test, and it's based on the same stuff. The difference is that other countries don't rely on multiple choice in the extreme way that the US does (some don't use them at all).

Re: patents.

My point was to show that her use of patents per citizen in the US was a (deeply) flawed way of highlighting how swell our education system is. I agree with points that have been made that aren't related to that conclusion, though.

So, here is my question. What would you say about those that test well on standardized test but have poor grades. Example a high above average score on a standardized test and a D in school?

It depends on what you know about the structure of both the test and the instruction which purportedly supports it.

It's possible that the test is far too easy, and that the instruction is genuinely rigorous and completely appropriate.

It's equally possible that the test is measuring mastery and that the student is completely checked out of the instruction because it is too remedial.

Also possible that it is neither of those things, and is a case of a curriculum and test that don't align in the least, and it's merely coincidental.

What is odd is that professors in Brin's generation (and my own) thought it was just fine to send their kids (no matter how able) to public schools.

That has changed rather radically in the last twenty years.

The shift seems to have been most extreme just in the past ten years.

HowlerKarma - yes, I agree with you on Brin's generation and the shift with the last 10 years.

Brin is the same age as my brother; I was in high school when Nation At Risk came out. Since then, we've had the same mantra about how public schools are not preparing students and falling behind in terms of global competition. Of course, since then, we've had one of the worst recessions since the Great Depression or in most people's memory. And, we've had major shifts for workers, the middle class, and an increasingly unpredictable economy.

In the 70s and 80s, you still could compare standardized test scores between school districts or states from the newspapers and people still relocated for better public schools. In MA, there was white flight to the suburbs and away from the inner cities or deprived areas, for instance. But you didn't have the Internet, of course. More significantly, you didn't have NCLB or other forms of state or national control to make teachers and public education more consistent or accountable, if you like.