And I don't think the Republican's genius proposal for standardized testing is going to do squat. All it is going to do is encourage teaching to the test.

England and Wales (maybe Scotland too, dunno) have had standardised testing for a while now. All it has proved is that there's one thing worse than teaching to a test, and that's parenting to a test: "Why are you wasting my child's time teaching this stuff that's not on the syllabus, when you could be going again over stuff that is?"

I'm sure I got a better education between the ages of 5 and 14 (not taught to tests) than between 14 and 18 (taught to tests). The material was less advanced, of course, but there were no arbitrary restrictions on how far the teacher would take it if the class all upped and ran with it.

In fairness, there were a couple of teachers who didn't teach to the test, either by announcing at the start of certain lessons "this isn't on the syllabus, I'm just telling you in case you're interested", or by just handing the more advanced pupils other stuff to get on with while they laboured the point on syllabus material to the rest of the class. But such teachers were in the minority, at least in science subjects. (Arts subjects, I'd imagine, are less susceptible to teaching to a test, because you can get arbitrarily advanced in an essay on Macbeth, whereas you simply can't solve GCSE maths questions with vector calculus.)

The only classroom lessons we got after the age of 14 that weren't taught to a test, were the sixth-form General Studies lessons I mentioned above. (They were nominally aimed at the A-level in General Studies, but as the examiners are allowed to ask absolutely anything, you can't teach to the test.) This had two results: firstly, about half the pupils simply bunked the lessons wholesale, and secondly, those of us who did turn up got interesting, insightful, challenging teaching such as most of us hadn't heard for years.

Peter