In Defense of Testing

People go into education because they love students.  They want to teach students, they want to help the world.  And people who are in education want to reward each other and they want to feel good about themselves and about each other.  So there’s a natural human aversion to the painful message that sometimes has to be delivered that says, “we’re not doing well enough and not only we as a collective are not doing well enough, but you as an individual are not doing well enough.”  

We need to have those measures.  We need to have that kick in the ass sometimes.  And so I think we need tests and we need to apply those tests to individual teachers, to individual schools, to individual students and to individual parents.  And it’s not pleasant to get a negative test result, but students have to live with it. I think the rest of us should have to live with it too.

60 Second Reads is recorded in Big Think’s studio. 

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