Black market schools

[FooSH]

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Quick question.

If there are 1000's of independent schools, how can parents and employers objectively tell which one is better without some kind of standardized testing?

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They don't. It's a subjective choice. Based on whatever is important to whoever is making the choice. It's called freedom.

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What is important to most parents is getting their child into the best school possible. There may be a handful of schools famed for there specialities or general achievement, but most schools are fairly anonymous. Say, for example, their child shows a gift / interest in maths. How do they know which school has the best maths department? As parents are usually free to choose any school, tests or no, freedom of choice is not the issue, it's access to unbiased information enabling them to make an informed choice.

What's important to the employers is having an easy way of sorting the wheat from the chaff. Companies don't give a [censored] about freedom, they would prefer easily referenced empirical standards.

I'm not saying standardized tests are a good thing, I agree with most of what Misfire's written above, but unless you can think of a better way of rating students and the schools themselves, I think their here to stay, at least in some form. Pragmatism will always defeat ideology.