[Rduke55]

Hopefully the thread is getting back on track.

What I was starting to get at with the "fix" question (I wasn't being a socratic ass or anything - I just wasn't sure of what I was trying to say) was that I think the problem is that with educating a crapload of students it's difficult to measure the quality of the education. Many people talk about the No Child Left Behind Act as the main villain here and I think that idea definitely has merit but the problem goes past that.

In this case public schools need to meet some benchmark for continued funding. Meeting that benchmark results in a kind of "training for the test" education that is certainly not optimal. But I think that this is also inherent to any large educational system, for public it's competing for tax dollars, for private it's competing for students.

How do we assess the quality of education? The fixable solutions I'm wondering about is whether or not there are problems with the tests themselves (can the tests be fixed) or with the idea of testing itself - should we use some other metric to grade education? If so, what should it be?