Fighting for Equity in Education

President Obama Says Testing Makes Education Boring

President Obama said it all about standardised testing in schools on Monday. He said that too much testing makes education boring for kids. He said that students should take fewer standardized tests and school performance should be measured in other ways than just exam results. He also criticised teaching to the test.

“Too often what we have been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools,” 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.

“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.”

Obama is pushing a re-write of the nation’s education law that would ease some of its rigid measurement tools. He said that 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.

The president endorsed the occasional administering of standardized tests to determine a “baseline” of student ability. He said his daughters recently took a standardized test that didn’t require advance preparation. Instead, he said, it was just used as a tool to diagnose their strengths and weaknesses.

From The Huffington Post

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