Does It All Add Up?

While speaking with a teacher this past weekend, I commented that many homeschool mothers spend inordinate amounts of time trying to be "as good as their public school counterparts" when it comes to subjects like math. The following is this teacher's account of what much of state education has become. Although this account focuses on the UK, I have heard corroborating accounts from many teachers here in the U.S.

By What Standard?*
by M.T.

State education has sought to divorce itself from a Biblical standard and as a result every school is left to determine the standard for itself. Everyone does what is “right in his own eyes.” The results should not surprise us.

As a high school mathematics teacher I am increasingly aware of the lack of standards. With no set standard in place, teachers are encouraged to do “what looks the best” for the school. The State argues that it has introduced standardized tests to ensure that all schools are meeting established standards, but the reality is that these are counterproductive and their results are deceptive.

I could give many examples of this. Perhaps a good place to start is to share my recent experience with the Year 9 (grade 9) SAT examinations in the UK. The 2008 national SAT examinations for year 9 were a complete fiasco, and, as a result, the government of the UK has cancelled national testing of students in year 9. Many schools are still writing the examinations that had been planned for 2009 but are marking them internally. The school I teach in is doing this in order to track students’ progress in order to publish our school statistics as to how well we are achieving. That may sound good to most parents, but there is much that parents do not realize.

Our year 9 students have just written their examinations. I am marking them at the moment. I will have final marks out of 150 for each student, but will not know how my students have achieved until after the assessment process. We, as a department, are not able to determine what the grade boundaries are until after the results have been recorded. This is usually the case in standardized public school testing. Children’s results are, literally, first determined and then the grade boundary (what level of achievement for an grade A, B, C , etc (in USA terms) – or 6, 7, 8, etc(in UK terms) would be acceptable. Our school has set targets as to how many students should have a certain level of achievement, and the idea is that the grade boundary should be adjusted to meet that – else the teachers’ heads will be on the chopping board. In a world where students’ laziness cannot be an adequate excuse for lack of achievement, teachers are made the scapegoats for poor grades and, therefore told by schools to adjust marks so that the truth of the students’ lack of achievement is not revealed to parents. Conversations involving being asked to alter results or “make up a grade that fits” are not unusual and are common practice – though for obvious reasons disguised.

That is just one aspect of the testing that takes place. The other side is that when exams are being set, standards are being dropped so that the grade boundaries do not have to be so low. I think this will be more obvious to you if I give you some examples of the type of questions on this year’s final year 9/grade 9 (13-14-year-olds) mathematics examination.

Here are some examples:

1) Join the numbers that add together to equal 1

0.1        0.99
0.11       0.9
0.01       0.999
0.91       0.89
0.001      0.09

2) How many millilitres are there in half a litre?

3) Houses cost GBP60000 one year ago. They now cost _______________. This is a 25% increase.

Many parents will recognize that this level of mathematics is what they did in primary school yet it is now high school curriculum. I graduated high school less than 10 years ago and can see a lowering of standards in that time, which to me is mind-blowing.

Schools are teaching-to-the-test. They tell students to answer "examination style" questions in a certain way. Since students are unthinkingly following a rote method, they have little comprehension of what they are actually doing. As a result, parents who help their children with their homework often find the schoolwork difficult as they do not understand the one method that students are being taught. The truth is that many parents are more than capable of doing the math, but their method of getting to the same answer is often different from their child’s “reproduce what the teacher does” method. This leaves parents thinking that the level of education is high when, in fact, it is designed to give parents that impression and make them more dependent on the schoolteacher.

The public school system is symptomatic of a society seeking to live autonomously, throwing out the standard of God’s Word. Each person seeks to benefit "self" and do what will make "self" look good. If a few grades need to get altered in the process, then that is what happens. Students, teachers and parents are left confused as to how their children really are progressing (or regressing). That is why I believe that only a school that recognizes the absolute and unchanging standard of the Word of God can truly be effective in educating children.

* (In order to maintain her anonymity, the pseudonym "Mae Thematics" has been used!)