Testing, Testing, Testing . . .

The Show Never Starts

When civil government assumes itself as demi-god powers to rule over families and their children, bad things happen.  When civil government forgets the most fundamental and essential duty of government is self-govenment, which in the case of overreaching state authority means restricting its own powers and overreaches, saying no to itself and its besetting lust for command and control, bad consequences necessarily follow. 

When civil government determines for itself that it has a duty and responsibility to teach children, subverting or replacing parents and families, illiteracy, innumeracy, and educational failure is the inevitable outcome.  One of the causes is that bureaucrats cannot stop being bureaucratic.  Instead of teaching, the bureaucratic mind requires measuring teaching, testing teaching, weighing teaching, and assessing teaching.  It's what bureaucrats do.  The bigger the country, the bigger the government, the worse the educational outcomes.  Pity the poor US kids in government schools.


Michelle Malkin explains one consequence of government schooling:  a tyranny of testing.

Have you had enough of the testing tyranny? Join the club. To be clear: I’m not against all standardized academic tests. My kids excel on tests. The problem is that there are too damned many of these top-down assessments, measuring who knows what, using our children as guinea pigs and cash cows.

College-bound students in Orange County, Fla., for example, now take a total of 234 standardized diagnostic, benchmark and achievement tests from kindergarten through 12th grade. Reading instructor Brian Trutschel calculated that a typical 10th-grade English class will be disrupted 65 out of 180 school days this year alone for mandatory tests required by the state and district. “It’s a huge detriment to instruction,” he told the Orlando Sentinel last month. The library at one Florida middle school is closed for a full three months out of the 10-month school year for computerized assessments.

“It’s horrible, because all we do is test,” Nancy Pace, the school’s testing coordinator, told the newspaper. “There’s something every month.” My Colorado 8th-grader has been tied up all week on her TCAPs (Transitional Colorado Assessment Program), which used to be called CSAPs (Colorado Student Assessment Program), which will soon be replaced by something else.

One is reminded of a fundamental credo of ungoverned civil government: if it moves, tax it; if it moves faster, tax it more; if it stops moving, subsidise it.  Applied to state education testing supplants taxing: if a school exists, test it; if it grows, test it more comprehensively; if it looks like closing down, help it fill in its tests.  No wonder pupils graduate severely truncated in their ability to read, write and compute.