Republican Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said he’ll ask lawmakers to approve a plan to replace the sweeping Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills with end-of-course exams in each of the core high school subjects. The proposal also could require high school juniors and seniors to take the ACT or SAT college entrance exams at state expense.

Way back when I was still in the public school system and this standardized testing situation was just getting started … my class was the first that had to pass a standardized test to graduate … we had end-of-course exams for all our classes. They were called FINAL EXAMS, and in general, if you totally flunked the final exam, you did not pass the course (and thus didn’t move forward or graduate). This sounds very much like reinventing the wheel.

I agree something needs to be done about the TAKS test and our dependence on it, and maybe this new plan is a step in the right direction. I don’t know why there is opposition to it from the Texas Association of Professional Educators.

“All you’re doing is taking one big test and making that many more tests that they still have to pass to pass the course,” said Adam Rondeau, a spokesman for the Association of Texas Professional Educators.

I can’t even put a number to how many tests I had to pass in order to pass classes during the course of my education. Do students not get tested at all in their classes on the information they are being taught? I’ve been disconnected from the world of public schooling for a long time now, but it seems silly to hear a teacher complaining that having more than “one test to rule them all” to determine whether or not a student has learned anything, and it somewhat boggles my mind. Tests are an important tool for educators. They let you know how well your students are absorbing the information you have been teaching them, and they also give you insight into how well you are teaching. I have never known a teacher who didn’t see the need to test students on their acquired knowledge several times during the year. I think some of them actually enjoyed it a little too much.

And for the record, I do not support all students being forced to take the ACT and SAT tests. Two reasons: Not everyone is going to be going to college (as sad as that fact is), and where do they intend to get the money to pay for all these tests? Oh yeah, they’ll just raise the cigarette tax a few more dollars while criminalizing smoking to the point where you can’t even smoke in your own home … or they’ll find some new thing to tax. :rolleyes:

Sometimes it feels like it’s the Texas legislatures sole purpose to totally and completely screw up our educational system. Well, they are doing a damn fine job of it, and the federal government is just as guilty in this regard.