NYC, part 2

For those who haven't read Seth Pearce's passage on the NYC project, here is the excerpt from my response:

I like your thinking, Seth. This is a very logical solution to the problem that we educators have been banging our head's against for years.

The question is, is this what we want? Do we want manufactured test scores? Do the "test prep skills" serve any purpose other than getting us into college? If you're anything like me, those test prep skills will totally be useless when you are 30, as you don't take standardized bubble-filling anymore.

If that's truly the only benefit, I'll raise you... why don't we just cheat? That would be really out there. With the disparity in salaries so stark, I'd say schools are being unethical if they don't do everything to help their students get into college. Let's give them the answers. Not perfect scores, but enough to get into the school. Like you mentioned, that would free up even more time for the most important learning in other classes.

Well... morally, we can't do that. I'd say it's wrong to manufacture test scores just as it is wrong to cheat. It doesn't help student. We need to help students be successful in the world by emphasizing creativity, analysis, problem-solving, and decision-making. Unfortunately, that puts us back in the same dilemma, namely the test scores, and that's where we as educators need to do some soul searching and see if those tests truly are the best thing to determine college-readiness.