Ah, well, Elroy, if you wish to think of it as an either/or between test scores and learning to think, et al, fine. I don't.
If you reread my note, you'll see what bothers me is the reduction of education to test scores. You need both. But, increasingly, in the US, for a variety of reasons, k-12 education gets evaluated vis a vis test scores, funding gets tied to it, salaries get tied to it, and so on. In my part of the US, New Jersey, it gets harder to justify money on the arts, music, etc., because the dollars head to whatever tests easily. |
