Here is a link to an opinion piece in today's Lancaster Intelligencer. It criticizes the PSSA testing:
I agree with assessment of the flaws in the testing and scoring. It is a bad test unfairly administered. It has a negative affect on education because schools focus teaching on the minimal standards which punishes all students above those standards. Bob Hollister (of Garden Spot) echoes this frustration.
There are a few problems I have with the article. First, I hate whining. I would fail than whine. When I read some parts of the article outloud I tend to read them in a whining voice. Second, at the end of the article defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory. The cry goes up for more funds. This is not the problem! The problem is that we have bad tests and that are bullied by them because we have no confidence that we can actually educate our children. This lack of confidence is justified--we are headed in the wrong direction on an downhill trot. As a culture, we really have no idea what sort of education we should give our kids and we have no idea if we have been successful unless we can back it up with Number 2 lead dots on a scantron sheet. (This is possibly the worst way to judge whether someone is educated well.) We need to repent and to return as a people to Christ in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge exist. He would also help us to start to have ultimate goals toward which we could build a curriculum and a society. He is the sine qua non of educational sanity.
That is what is so comforting about a classical Christian education. We have outcomes that we are looking for. They stay steady. You have to watch carefully for them--looking at standardized testing is only a tiny part of our assessment of our success.
