I don't understand this talk about "the public education system". Every school and school district is going to be different. Some are great and others are not. I understand if you live in an area with middling-to-poor schools, but lots of people live near great public schools.
I’m sure there are good public schools, but my experience and the experience of everyone I’ve ever known has not been positive. Combined with policies like California’s [1], I don’t think it’s unreasonable to just be skeptical of most American public education.
The cows are not putting on enough weight, better weigh them more often.
Teaching to the test is akin to teaching music only through sheet music; no instruments. The test is a mile wide and an inch deep and instead of helping students appreciate and understand topics and apply that knowledge creatively, we rush temporary memorization and regurgitation.
Like all measures, once they become a target, they become a poor measure.
The educators that stood out in my life were the ones who were passionate and interesting and added their own experiences and perspectives. We have somewhere between 40-60 teachers over the course of a typical public education. I'd hope at least a good cross-section of those bring something to the table other than rote explanations of test questions.
>Why is there an assumption that what is on the test is inherently worthless but every individual teacher is qualified to design an entire curriculum?
Because my mother went to school for six years for exactly that purpose? Some states have pretty high requirements for teachers, and they tend to do well.
Also, the "teach to test" BS is extremely locality dependent. There are zero things you can generalize across all public schools in the US.
For what it's worth my bar is higher. Can we expect every teacher to design a top-tier curriculum independently?
Or, in other words, do we need hundreds of thousands of curricula? Doesn't that leave a lot of by definition below average curricula. Would selecting among even dozens of well-designed options make sense instead?
Years ago, like right before khan academy became popular, I had started making a math education platform. The idea would have been to have many instructors and lessons/sections votes and scores that lead to the best courses that students could choose from based on any further preferences. It would have also provided a skill tree and automated assessments for placement and assessment. As new, better instructors got traction, they could have courses promoted. The financial incentives would be profit sharing between the platform and top educators. Never got it close enough to launching and then started a new gig and never got back to it.
