President Obama is apparently in hot pursuit of the student vote. He announced Monday that he thinks our poor, pampered little darlings are either bored by tests or punished by them.
The Associated Press has news that tests our patience:
President Barack Obama said Monday that students should take fewer standardized tests and school performance should be measured in other ways. Too much testing makes education boring for kids, he said.
“Too often what we have been doing is using these tests to punish students,” the president told students and parents at a town hall hosted by the Univision Spanish-language television network at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, D.C.
Obama, who is pushing a rewrite of the nation’s education law that would ease some of its rigid measurement tools, said policymakers should find a test that “everybody agrees makes sense” and administer it in less pressure-packed atmospheres, potentially every few years instead of annually.
At the same time, Obama said, schools should be judged on criteria other than student test performance, including attendance rate.
“One thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching the test because then you’re not learning about the world, you’re not learning about different cultures, you’re not learning about science, you’re not learning about math,” the president said. “All you’re learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test and that’s not going to make education interesting.”
“And young people do well in stuff that they’re interested in,” Obama said. “They’re not going to do as well if it’s boring.”
Let us summarize the President’s position: Don’t judge students on things like tests, because that could cause members of the teachers unions to look bad, but do judge them on things like showing up for class because that causes more tax dollars to flow directly into the school districts.
In othe words, let’s just change it from “No Student Left Behind” to “Leftist Students Sitting On Their Behinds” and get it over with.
Source: Associated Press
