Asking out of pure ignorance, I'm curious to know what the answer is to increasing student proficiency. As I remember it, a lot of people thought state or even national exams were a good idea when they were first proposed. These were proposed because public schools were considered a failure for many students.
A lot of it was inner city schools, which receive so much less funding (mostly because property taxes tend to fund schools) than the schools in the wealthy suburbs that have swimming pools and tennis courts.
Now, and I say this as very much an outside observer because I'm not at all involved in education, it seems like the tests are an abysmal failure. Everything I read seems to point to this as an almost unarguable point. Your story offers more evidence.
So, was it a good idea gone bad? Or was it never a good idea? Was the solution to improved schools somewhere else?
It seems like part of the problem overall when it comes to improving schools is that we don't ask the people like you how to make improvements.
Instead, legislators, sometimes education administrators are included, sometimes not, gather together to proclaim their solutions, and suddenly here we are, worse, apparently, than before.
Why we as a society can't gather people like you together to figure this stuff out is just beyond me. The experts are the people on the ground doing the hard work every day.
The uninformed part of me thinks we need to roll back testing and reconsider how we fund public schools so that there is some redistribution of the wealth. An inner city school should not be falling apart (thus attracting even fewer teachers) while a kid in Northbrook, Illinois gets to hang out in the shiny new swimming pool.
That's by no means a panacea, and it sure doesn't help the shooting drill problem, but income disparity among schools feels like a big issue.
As for shooting drills, well, the gun nutters had their own presidential candidate shot at, and they've responded by walking around like zombies in a cult fest wearing bandages on their ear and cheering on Hulk Hogan like he's President Camacho in Idiocracy.
