To: elmatador who wrote (67217 ) 8/11/2005 3:05:16 AM From: Seeker of Truth Read Replies (2) | Respond to Measuring performance in education is usually not straightforward. Suppose a history teacher in North America has a class with a large number of Brazilians and other South Americans. In that case she or he might spend 20% of the time talking about the conquest of most of the Western Hemisphere by the Portuguese and Spanish, how they treated the native peoples,subsequent import of African slaves, struggle for independence,domination by the US, struggle against that, etc. etc. So the students in that class would do correspondingly poorer on the standardized history exams because these have only a 6% weighting on Latin American history. Such specializations occur with all subjects, even science. Every teacher has aspects that they love most to teach because the have the greatest understanding of them or because they consider those aspects the most important, giving them a weighting greater than those on the standardized tests and therefore decreasing the exam performance of their students on the rest of the stuff.
