A taste of radical thought
In my last post I warned not to read John Taylor Gatto unless your were prepared to be radicalized. Not sure if you are prepared or not? Then I recommend you spend a few minutes with Gatto's American Education History Tour. If you are prepared for a whole new view of the public education model, you will get a little taste of morethanfine radical thought. If you're not prepared, you will have only wasted a little bit of your time!
And from that, a quick thought about test scores:
Former presidential candidate (2000), Bill Bradley had a very low score of 480 on the verbal part of his SATs, yet graduated from Princeton, won a Rhodes Scholarship, and became a US senator;
President George W. Bush got degrees from Yale and Harvard, became governor of Texas, and president of the United States—with a mediocre 550.
If you can be a Rhodes Scholar, graduate from Ivy League schools and become governor, senator, and president with mediocre SAT scores, what exactly do the tests measure?
posted by Barb @ 10:17 AM
4 Comments:
seems we need a more competitive entrance exam for the White House (any public office actually)!
The ONLY thing that honestly matters for a person to go places politically is to have money behind them. It has nothing to do with competence, intelligence, readiness, ethics, or any other metric or value.
Too many people near and at the top have "failed upward", we at the "bottom", who have to pay the piper, are paying the piper with our own lives and those of our children.
(our blog)
I actually think it is about ambition. If one is driven by ambition, for whatever reason, I think they will be more likely to scramble to the top--regardless of their ethics or morals. Of course, adequate finances are needed, but I think there is an innate desire and a strong sense of competitiveness that pushes one into the highest echelons of politics or any field.
But the point is standardized exams don't really test anything real.
Barb
Nope, testing (esp state run testing written and ajudicated by people who are not actually interacting with the student herself) is for the teacher, not the student.
re: political success .. I can tell you from personal experience that ambition can be in place, and coming from the right place, and it is for not if one doesnt have the financing. And, what one has to do to obtain the ready flow of cash is not trivial and should not be trivialized just because it is a common activity.
A politician is bought on many levels.
The extant political power structures must be convinced that they have you in their pockets. Without this, the candidate will not get the volunteers.
The voters must feel that they have the politician in their pocket (on some level, be it racial, socioeconomic, ideological, in other words, identity politics) to vote for said politician.
The donors (people or corporations) must be convinced that they have the politican in their pockets to make the financial investment.
Lets just say that if you want to still eat sausage, dont visit the sausage factory.
Similarly, if you want to believe that we have a democracy, dont run for office :-)
I am of the firm opinion that standardized tests only test how well one takes tests...
Or in the case of a group sampling, how well the group was coached on how to take such a test.
Some of the best and brightest will crash and burn and some of the least capable in real life will ace the test.
And so goes the bell curve.
Barb
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