Public School Education System Thread

[Okeefenokee]

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[apeman]

You can beat on teachers all you like

Pervert.

[Okeefenokee]

You can beat on teachers all you like

Pervert.

[SuburbanFarmer]

the four companies that dominate the testing market -- three test publishers and one scoring firm.

Those four companies are Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB McGraw-Hill, Riverside Publishing (a Houghton Mifflin company), and NCS Pearson. According to an October 2001 report in the industry newsletter Educational Marketer, Harcourt, CTB McGraw-Hill, and Riverside Publishing write 96 percent of the exams administered at the state level. NCS Pearson, meanwhile, is the leading scorer of standardized tests.

The only reason those companies exist is because of the DoE.

Citation needed.

[Smitty-48]

Was the teachers who used to lay a beating on us, slapped, punched, kicked, the whole shebang, funnily enough, when I got to the School of Hard Knocks, the Sar-Major never layed a glove on me, didn't have to, scary enough just to have him look you up and down, wasn't gonna sow the wind, in the face of the whirlwind.

[SuburbanFarmer]

This is why I'm so confused about you guys jumping all over the DoE...

Education is not the role of a federal government, federal states are not unitary states, by definition.

No Politburo of Education, Ministries of Truth therein, for the federated states of the free.

If you want a Chairman Meow, move to China.

Thanks for adding to the conversation.

[Okeefenokee]

the four companies that dominate the testing market -- three test publishers and one scoring firm.

Those four companies are Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB McGraw-Hill, Riverside Publishing (a Houghton Mifflin company), and NCS Pearson. According to an October 2001 report in the industry newsletter Educational Marketer, Harcourt, CTB McGraw-Hill, and Riverside Publishing write 96 percent of the exams administered at the state level. NCS Pearson, meanwhile, is the leading scorer of standardized tests.

The only reason those companies exist is because of the DoE.

Citation needed.

Alright, not exist outright, but the reason they are as big as they are is because of the federal standards that require such large companies. Plenty of states want to drop the federal testing, which would shrink those companies as their funding shrinks.

[Speaker to Animals]

Private universities, for example, often don't care about GRE or SAT scores, but do their own testing and screening. It's at the state government level that these corporations can lobby legislators to require the testing for admission. Legislators get money for campaigns, and the state universities are forced to require SAT and GRE scores for prospective students.

These big testing corporations are a product of government, with some obvious exceptions.

We still need some kind of standardized testing with which to compare school performance, however. There exists no way around that fact. A national-level standardized testing system should be preferred in conjunction with school vouchers and school choice. For a school to get the vouchers, they have to meet minimum standards, among which include some basic threshold of average test scores by their graduates.

[Speaker to Animals]

If anything, I think the risk in going to a full school voucher system derives from the fact that schools will all struggle to outperform the other schools, causing the average test scores to rise, which in turn could result in the federal government raising the minimum requirements for schools to receive voucher money. That could lead to significant barriers to entry for new schools to cater to specific needs of families.

[apeman]

That's a really interesting thought