Hope

Note: The following article appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, page A6 on Tuesday, March 29, 2011. Associated Press.

Headline: Obama: Too many standardized tests

Washington—President Obama said Monday that students should take fewer standardized tests and that school performance should be measured in other ways than just exam results. Too much testing makes education boring for children, he said.

“Too often what we have been doing is using these tests to punish students or, in some cases, to punish schools,” he told students and parents at a town hall hosted by the Univision Spanish-language TV network at Bell Multicultural High School.

Obama, who is pushing a rewrite of the nation’s education law that would ease some of its rigid measurement tools, said 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.

At the same time, Obama said, schools should be judged on criteria other than student test performance, including attendance rate. “Young people do well in stuff that they’re interested in,” Obama said. –AP.

Comment: At last, there is hope for sanity in the field of education. If people will listen to the President. On the other hand, the final sentence sounds like a non-sequitur. I guess what he means is that if students are interested, they will attend school regularly. And high stakes tests are definitely not interesting to students. RayS.