Standardized Tests

On December 5 I did a post called Economic Lessons Learned on how some people's perceptions can change. Ronald Reagan used to use a definition of a recession as something when you know your neighbor is unemployed and a depression is when you are unemployed. Personal perceptions play a lot into our understandings of economics - and that is especially true for issues like globalization. One of my comments in that post was about a programmer who changed his opinion about globalization when he could get the benefit of understanding the relative comparative advantage of his skills versus other programmers around the world who could be hired to do the simple stuff. I got a comment from a reader who made two points. First, he suggests that the perception of the programmer who decided globalization is OK so long as his personal situation is OK. I believe, and I think the data show it to be true, that globalization is a net positive for the American economy. Positive economic lessons for some come from their own comfort. My point in that post was exactly what the reader suggested but also that even without that understanding of the programmer, that the net balance for our continued involvement in the global economy is a positive one.

His second comment is a bit more obscure - "And why do you think standardized tests undermine the ability to be creative and show ingenuity? If you think the latter will be of much value if they come from a place devoid of basic understandings of important facts and possession of important skills, then you fall in with the pied piper myths of "progressive educators" that are a cause of the current educational failures." I am not, as anyone can see if they read this blog, a friend of "progressive educators" the monstrosities that they have added to our educational system are monumental. However, that I am not a friend of the progressives does not mean that I will agree with everything that the other side suggests. Last year the Economist did a wonderful survey of higher education in the world. They found that 17 or the top 20 research universities in the world were American. The magazine explained that the reason for that is that the American system, as opposed to many European systems of higher education, does not have a centralized approach to higher education - our system is not a system. Does that mean I do not support creating a way to judge educational performance? Of course not. My concern is more that a lot of the measures that we have adopted, which are standardized, are so narrow in their definitions of quality or achievement that they are useless. That is a very different thing, but thanks for the comment.