Interesting article. I can totally see teachers trying to cheat to get a bonus. But that to me is not a knock on the standardize test as much as some teachers/people willing to do anything for a few grand. A simple solution would be to have a SAT like test where teachers get removed from the testing site during the test taking period.
I believe good teachers should be rewarded and bad teachers should be fired. Good teachers should be making >$100k. I just find it funny that the union was against the idea of merit pay (good teachers making good $ and bad teachers being fired).
One other point the movie brought up is the lack of choice. You’re stuck w/ the schools in your neighborhood. So, if you’re poor, you have little to no chance to give your kid(s) a great education if the local school is failing. The great school systems in some of the European country have the money follow the student and leave it up to the parents to decide which school they want to put their kids into. This forces schools to compete for that $.
Another good point I got from the movie is that we’re not getting our money’s worth in the current public school system. On average, public school in SD is spending between $9k-$10k/student. I’m in the process to looking at private schools and most preschool-elementary school charge around $6k-$9k/year (with schools like La Jolla Country day being the exception). A lot of the private schools I toured pride themselves on the fact that kids at 5 can do addition/subtraction and by the time they’re 6, they can do multiplication/division. In another thread, someone mentioned that in a PQ elementary school, their 1st grade child first few days’ home work was to count 1-3. That really shocked me when I heard that, because my son is only 2 and he can count 1-10 in 5 different languages and know his ABC.
