Parents are not so much wary of testing or standards as they are concerned about exactly what students will be expected to know and why. Too often, parents who expect schools to teach their children to write a grammatically correct sentence with no spelling errors, find their home state on a map and calculate the change they're owed when they make a purchase find that some schools seem more interested in indoctrinating kids to recycle newspapers and cans. The student should be able to spell and define words such as assignment, neighbor and receive. The average eighth-grader should be able to do long division, figure percentages, measure the area of room, balance a checkbook, calculate with decimals and solve a simple equation. My grandmother never attended school past third grade, and my father's education ended in the ninth grade, but both of them could have easily passed a test meant to measure such skills.
American children spend more years in school now than at any time in history.
But they seem to learn less, even while the money for education has increased exponentially over the last three decades. The problem is not that we don't know how to measure what children have learned but that we've given up teaching them skills that merit measuring. In an effort to improve self-esteem, everyone's solution was discussed and valued equally. Until schools commit themselves to teaching skills worth knowing, no national test will solve the problem of declining academic standards. E.W. Scripps Publications , All Rights Reserved.