c:\doc\web\97\09\kstest.txt


Date sent:        Mon, 3 Nov 1997 05:03:20 -0500
From:             KEISIOUX <75713.1375@compuserve.com>


To bolster the alert given below, that congressional opposition to
Clinton's federal testing scheme is fading and needs to be reinforced, look
at the Seattle Times I believe this past Thurs, editorial cartoon. THe
subject is daycare rather than educaiton but it applies: it shows Clinton
reading to a group of day-care kids, and the story he's reading is
campaign-like rhetoric about himself as the brave and good president who
stood up and saved the poor children from the mean Republicans, or
something self-serving like that. That's what's wrong with federal testing
- anyone who conrols education inevitably desires to make education
promulgate its own agenda; only government - esp one run by someone as
self-serving as Clinton (either one) or Gore - has the means to do so. The
whole reason local control exists is to prevent this kind of abuse from
being wide-ranging or monopolized. Federal control would do exactly that.


They say it's just math and reading. But reading comprehension: what
selection of material are you given and asked to comprehend? Is it
politically loaded? The answers are essay form, with subjective assessment.
Will you be graded on how well you ascertained the gist of the reading
selection, or on how much you agreed with it?


The late California Learning Assessment Survey(?) asked this math question,
according to Eagle Forum:
You have 17 apples and 4 kids. What's the most even way to divide them?
Most of you would say 4.25 per kid. THe correct answer actually was, find
out who the neediest kid was and give that kid the remaining apple.
A math question could also go like this:
If sea level is rising one inch per year due to global warming, how long
til Florida (highest elevation 60 ft) is drowned?
The problem with that question is that it's not agreed if there is such a
thing as global warming; and in any case sea level is not rising anywhere
close to an inch per year. With all the talk of integrating and applying
the basics, or making them relevant to problem-solving or real life, the
kid will think this and other such "real-life" situations are true. Often
they're not. But if you don't believe it, you won't get the "correct"
answer.


Knowing the current administration, they could write national test
questions about their innocence of fundraising scandals or in favor of some
tax hike or some such self-justifying self-serving point.


Also note a wire-service story in today's Times quotes Sen Maj Ldr Trent
Lott as somehow supporting the opposition to federal testing.