“Thank you for all the high stakes tests you gave me at school, said no student ever”
What a sad world we live in.
Education has – for some – become a means of exploiting children in order to make money.
The business of high stakes testing has become big business indeed. It has nothing to do with improving educational outcomes for children and everything to do with making a buck.
If it was about success for students it would be based on solid best practice, good research and profit making wouldn’t ever enter the equation.
Which money grabbing ‘Scroge McDuck’ ever thought of exploting children, I wonder. Is this the modern day equivalent of workhouses and sweat shops? Where the ‘product’ is the child, and the money making device the ‘test’. Where Charter schools and privatisation of education allows for corners to be cut and profits to be maximised?
I have to ask – how did people get sucked into this elaborate ruse?
Its an ‘Emperors new clothes’ syndrome. The carefully manufactured ‘crises’ in education have been so well crafted they have taken on a life of their own. Communities believe the spin and trust in educators has fallen. As more money is siphoned from the public education coffers it acts as the catalyst to become a self fullfulling prophecy. Fail to maintain a system and it will slowly degrade.
Meanwhile ‘Scroge McDuck’ and his cronies sit back and reap in the profits.
Parents and students all the while, are merely the pawns.
I do wonder what this will leave us with in ten, fifteen or twenty years time? What will become of these students and what will our society look like? Huge sigh.
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| Best illustrated by Signe Wilkinsons cartoon (c)Signe Wilkinson and the Philadelphia News |