Yesterday I wrote about the hoax of standards, and the call to throw out state-wide tests. Recently the Georgia Department of Education released preliminary results based on the CRCT tests that were administered state-wide in the spring. You can go the Department of Education, and view the results by grade level. It might make you sick.

In an article written by Jeffrey Whitfield for the Clayton News Daily-Online, he reported that “slightly more than 58 percent of students in sixth grade, 59 percent of seventh graders and just over 40 percent of eighth graders did not meet standards on the science portion of the CRCT. Science was an area that students from many school systems struggled to pass.” The Department of Education explains these dismal results by claiming that they developed “harder” tests, and curriculum. This kind of thinking always amazes me. Here, from the education chief that wanted to ban evolution from the new “harder” curriculum comes this claim. I guess the officials need to take their personal failings (elected officials and business leaders point to them for the sorry state of education) and lay it on the students. The students become pons in high stakes game of educational testing and standards.

Of course the solution to the problem (at least in the immediate 2 month future) is to send the students who failed the test back to school. To learn what? Not much. Just be able to pass the test. So education gets reduced to helping kids practice to take the test.

By reducing education to this annual confession that our kids didn’t do so well and they need more of the same in summer makes you wonder what role teachers play in all of this. Certainly, they are held “accountable” (prisoner) to the test and their students better pass the test. There is little room for innovation and creativity in this approach to education—actually I wouldn’t call it education, I’d call it rehersing for the test.

Lots of students are left behind in the State of Georgia’s educational system. Why? We need an investigation and evaluation of the so called “No Child Left Behind” policy. We should oppose such a policy.