Do you have a 'national curriculum' in the States whereby every child in the country is to be taught certain things and by a certain age ? Here we have set stages.The children are tested and all schools are inspected to ensure that the standards are being met at the different ages. The English one is just being reviewed and revised as needed, as it regularly is.This caught my eye:

Children will be expected to type their names by six, to type, edit and redraft a text by eight and be able to use various word processing packages by eleven.

Yeah, right. I can only just manage to send an email and that typing with one finger.

The rest was only mildly reassuring: children still have to know their tables up to 10 x 10 by age nine (na na ne na na: knew mine well before then ) but then they are to know maths symbols including 'greater than' and 'less than' by age six (Would knowing how many yards there are in a pole do instead ? ).

By the way, it gets worse for us over fifties.Some of this stuff seems advanced to us but the ages for the achievements are being gradually lowered over the years , with each revision. At this rate they'll soon have word processors instead of rattles and bricks

I remember taking school-wide tests that determined if we were ready to go on. They happened every few years. I can't remember if they'd actually prevented you from going to the next grade or what. And I don't know if it's a national thing though or just a school thing.

Oh, take a look at this.

We were given the Iowa tests every few years. I think they showed how a person performed compared to a national average. I only remember them covering grammar, reading and math skills. Since it was all multiple choice, I don't see how it could have been very accurate because we were always told to guess the answer if we didn't know it.

All they do here is teach students to take proficiency tests! My son passed the high school proficiency in the 8th grade (when he was 13) and asked for his diploma. They spend so much time on these tests, I'm sure it's the reason the most often asked question by college students is "Do we have to know this for the test?" They aren't interested in knowing more than is required to pass the exam.

"All they do here is teach students to take proficiency tests!"

This is the problem with so many tests and so much emphasis on test scores. The school administration pressures teachers to make sure that the students score well on the tests. This of course, causes the teachers to "teach the test", which results in short-term memorization of certain facts, with no emphasis on understanding. You can teach a parrot to recite the list of US presidents, but not to understand why each got elected. Rote learning certainly has a place, but it is no substitute for comprehension.

From what I remember of those tests, none of the questions dealt with memorizations skills.

I remember a million questions like:

Which word in the following sentence is incorrect:

Basketball is a game that were played with 5 people.

or

Which of the following numbers completes the series:

2,4,8,16 ___

I may be wrong but I believe a lot of the questions have little to do with memorization. I don't disagree about the improper emphasis placed on testing students rather than teaching them.

I also vaguely remember the Iowa tests in elementary school. What mainly comes to mind is reading comprehension, where they give you a short passage and ask questions about it. As I recall that's where I first learned about the Cardiff Giant.

"I don't see how it could have been very accurate because we were always told to guess the answer if we didn't know it." That's a pretty standard methodology. Given enough questions, such tests can still achieve a high degree of validity.

In my day the teachers taught a standard curriculum and the tests measured performance. I believe the problem today -- already identified above by DG -- is that they "teach the test" and center the curriculum around it, invalidating the whole process. Basic education in the US seems to have really gone downhill in a vicious cycle of lowered expectations --> less taught --> poorer performance --> lower expectations...

Ideally, teachers would be valued more highly by society and earn a much higher pay, making it more attractive and competitive as a career, thereby raising the overall quality of teachers and administrators. But how we could ever get from here to there is, to me, a political and economic mystery.

I recently had an opportunity to do some volunteer work at an elementary school in Chicago. The elementary school has been on academic probation for over 10 years due to poor test scores. It was really sad to me that the teachers emphasized this "failure" to the students and harped on them that they were working to get off the bad school list.

I think everyone in that school has excellent intentions, but to me, I think it is grossly unfair to look at a 9 year old and tell them that they have failed and that they have to learn something just to get the school off of some list. I had to listen to people tell them that they'd end up in prison if they couldn't read, that they'd end up poor and without jobs if they didn't do their homework... it was completely negative. (it was teachers saying these things, not volunteers)

Our system of property taxes paying for public schools sets up these horrible situations where one elementary school is completely underfinanced versus another. It's really wrong. When looking for real estate people can look at the report card of the school district for the area. The report cards will tell them how well the students do on their standardized tests... it matters to a whole lot of people and it's self perpetuating because no one with any money is going to move into a crumby school district with their kids, so the property tax base constantly diminishes and the poor schools suffer increasingly. So they are the ones hiring the bottom of the pay scale teachers, getting the least equipment and having the least amount of extra curricular programs. These are probably the kids that need the most in all those departments because their parents aren't paying for travel soccer leagues, for extra music lessons or for a home computer... and most of all they need the best teachers because many of the kids don't encounter anyone with an education above high school level at home.

So anyway. I feel like the standardized tests could tell us something useful and we could set to fixing the obvious problems in our education system, but more often than not, the standardized tests are used to perpetuate the inequity in our public schools and further isolate the poor people from services that the rest of the people have access to. It's a cycle that we're not stopping.