Full disclosure: I hate everything about standardized testing.
John Oliver took on standardized testing last night.
John Oliver: Standardized tests—the fastest way to terrify any child with five letters outside have just whispering the word, "clown." It's currently testing season all over the country and with that comes the usual flood of anxiety and school produced videos designed to get kids in the mood.
They cut to the school-produced videos which are truly cringeworthy efforts, using kids parodying pop songs of the day to sell tests. It's mouth agape television watching at this point. Last week tonight ends with a test rally-monkey that a Texas school employed to pump the kids up for testing.
face meet palm
Needs no more description. From there he moved into the
recent boycotts around the nation of standardized Common Core testing. Followed by the insane amount of tests students are being subjected to this day and age. An average of 113 different tests by graduation.
Oliver: 113 is a lot of tests, it's approaching the amount that you would ask your doctor for, the morning after you woke up from a one night stand with Colin Farrell.
"Just give me all of them twice."
Oliver: And this amount of testing can take a toll.
[news stories on children crying, being sick, scared, anxious]
That's true. In fact this happens so much that official instructions for test administrator specify what to do if a student vomits on his or her test booklet. And something is wrong with our system when we just assume a certain number of kids will vomit.
He wonders aloud why we have so many standardized tests. This leads to a montage of late 1990s news pieces on the United States' poor showing in global test scores.
Bring back the Colin Ferrell image please.
Oliver: In response to those kind of statistics, President George W. Bush, on just his third day in office, announced his No Child Left Behind program. It passed Congress with bipartisan support because of course it did. Voting against No Child Left Behind is like voting against No Puppy Left Unsnuggled. What kind of monster would do that!
He explains how Bush and others said that a data driven system with "accountability" was put into place.
Oliver: Unfortunately, "accountability" is one of those concepts that everyone's in favor of but nobody knows how to make it work, like "synergy" or maxi dresses. No matter who wears them they look like a poncho tried to f*#k a waterfall.
Oliver doesn't leave anyone out. He follows this up with clips showing a candidate Barack Obama telling a conference of teachers that standardized testing was not a good metric of evaluation. Of course, that went to the wayside with initiatives like
Race to the Top. Oliver points out that while the intentions of these programs may be good, their implementation seems to go very wrong. Cue news stories about teacher salaries being connected to testing scores.
It is all worth watching. The rest can be seen below the fold.