Our new president uttered this inane phrase during one of his recent campaign tours, probably speaking to an excited gymnasium full of third-graders, who had no idea what he was talking about. George W. Bush's education agenda, like the man himself, is shallowly constructed. From the beginning of his presidential campaign, the advocate of states' rights has constantly contradicted himself. He has spoken of creating a federal voucher system, or opportunity scholarships, or whatever they are being called this week, and coordinated student proficiency testing. He wants testing to be mandatory for grades three through eight and wants to hold schools accountable for failing to produce enough students who pass the tests.
Testing makes no sense.
Many potentially bright students already fail in school because of difficulty with test-taking, especially standardized ones. Multiple-guess questioning is far from a foolproof gauge of intelligence. Many young people with creative tendencies are never able to discover their potential because of our educational obsession with the supposed importance of memorization skills. Emphasis on testing and school accountability would only create an even more unimaginative education system. Because of pressure put on schools to perform, the curricula of grades three through eight would be inundated with preparation for proficiency tests.