Panel Releases Proposal to Set U.S. Standards for Education

There already is a national standard for the 8th grade. It is called the national tests for the 8th grade given every two years by the federal government. Currently there are only national tests of the federal government for the 4th and 8th grade in Reading and Math every two years. Test should be added for the 12th grade and the tests should be given every year by the federal government. By the way the government has still not released the results of the Reading tests given in 2009. It is over a year since these tests were given. At this point it looks like there has been a foul up regarding these tests or the results are so poor the government wants to hold off releasing them. The results of the Math test were released last year. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/states/ As for standards for Reading it is absurd to detailing what books should be read and at what grade for every public school in the nation. A child should be able to read and the evidence of this ability is a national test. It does not matter whether that child learned to read from a book by E.B. White or Bill Peet. Teachers in classes should pick the books that they feel are most appropriate for teaching children the joys of reading and not a book by selected by some designated government official. Public schools should teach children how to read. The only way to determine if that is being done well is national tests where the differences through out the nation are made insignificant by the large number of students taking the test. Standards in Math makes sense but in reading the only standard is that an individual can read or not read. There are serious problems in public school education and the federal government is only contributing to those problems.

Simple logical exposition this is not. I will try to comb it out. I know a bit about this. My youngest brother does statistics for N Y S ed. He talks, I ask.

There is the question of the purpose of the national test.

The purpose of the test is to examine the relative performance of the teachers.

The teachers do not like it.

The average duration of an address is about three years. Only half of the sample is retested in a meaningful way.

Data for individual students is not recorded.

The product data is so noisy as to be meaningless.

I can conclude that the poster is mistaken. The statistical view in this post is nonsense.

My siblings taught themselves to read at age three to four. Well before the school system went to work on them. I did not teach myself. Dyslexia is subtle and deceptive. I learned to dissemble. Several years later, I was taught to read. I remember the process. I remember my delight when the marks on the page became thoughts and stories and explanations. The learning took two years of one on one instruction and drill. Prohibitive in a classroom.

Fifteen years ago I took a required art school survey course on the romantics.

My fellow students had no vocabulary, no understanding of meter, no ability to accent and articulate. In short they got the words but not the music.

I think they had never before been called on to recite a text.

There is an enormous difference between struggling to see the words and being able to unfold the thought from the page.

The child does not read. The child can puzzle out the words. The child reads. The child reads for pleasure.

The child reads for pleasure is success. Anything less by the eighth grade is failure and waste. There is a lot of that.

Now, how can we discover this with an Opscan form? Can an appreciation of verse be read from an Hollerith card?