I think a difference between the Canadian (well, Ontarian) system and the American system might be the reason we disagree here. Students here write standardized math, reading, and writing tests every three years (Grades 3, 6, and 9). There's also a "literacy test" which is taken in Grade 10. It's a good check, imo, and as far as I know it hasn't ruined anybody's life.

In America, our schools receive funding based on those tests so they're taken annually and the back half of the year is direct prep for those tests instead of learning new content. Your literacy test sounds like an equivalent to our high school exit exam.

Do you have much regional disparity in Canada? In the US the difference between states and even cities can be greater than the difference between most countries.

To measure how effective the education system is in elementary areas---reading, writing, and 'rithmetic---that have standards which are easy to define (e.g. every Grade 3 student should be able to multiply two-digit numbers or every Grade 9 student should be able to fix a run-on sentence).

Can you provide an example of variations because of context?

Rural Alabama versus the Hamptons.

Geez, the funding connection sounds like your problem right there. Afaik we only use them to monitor the effectiveness of curricula and teaching methods across the board.

Not really any regional disparity, to my knowledge. A public education is about the same anywhere.

That’s a good question. It’s an obvious and fair question to ask.

To answer it one needs to decide if a yearly objective measure even needs to be taken and if the answer is yes then you’re left with how the assessment is given and what’s going to be done with the data on a micro and macro level.

Believe it or not, the only standardized tests I took from K—12 were the SAT and an IQ test. My yearly progress was measured by my grades. At that time and place grades alone were an adequate measure of student progress because culturally teachers sincerely believed in the social contract between them and the community. In other words, grades meant something. Teachers were entrusted with case-by-case discretion with matters like social promotion but they wouldn’t just give out absurdly inflated grades. So colleges looked at your GPA and your entrance exam scores and there you had it. Teachers could be trusted.

Fast forward twenty years and I’m back in high school as a teacher. Naively, I expected something resembling what I left. What I got was students well over six foot getting inches from my face telling me to **** off. I never saw that kind of behavior as a student. I had never seen teachers treated like that. In the break room I soon learned that teachers didn’t give a damn about any kind of social contract with the community. The harder I tried to teach the more aggressively I was attacked and the community didn’t give a **** what I did. The hallway my classroom was in had a turnover rate similar to a fast food restaurant. The following year my entire department was replaced including myself. I learned that you simply had to pass students all the time or you were fired. Grades meant nothing and if the community thought teachers weren’t doing much to try to educate the youth they were right. Obviously, grades could no longer measure adequate yearly progress. So we traded a system where teachers were treated with at least a little bit of respect and in return they basically acted like teachers for a system where everyone hates each other and a huge corporation makes billions of dollars pretending to fill the void. And you know how corporations are, they like to keep expanding. But that’s another rabbit hole.

Schools may look like buildings but they’re really a set of functioning norms. Right now, at least in the microcosm that I recently abandoned, reasonable norms had been abandoned and replaced with something dark and surreal that reminded me of how I imagine the softer side of Maoism worked.

I’m always partial to radical solutions so you can take this with a grain of salt. To me, public education in America is like a house abandoned in a hurricane. It’s completely infested with mold. Irreparable damage has taken hold and it needs to be razed. It’s a health hazard. Young people aren’t being educated they’re being infested with a soul destroying fungus.

each province has their own testing system. so there would be a difference between any city/town in Alberta and Ontario but not between a city and small town in Alberta. PATs aren't used in the same way SATs are in the states.

the test prep also isn't as big of a deal here. it's essentially treated as the final exams (often taking the place or at least part of). I'm not even sure teachers are graded much on their students' test scores, and I think (could be wrong) but the tests are usually treated as question evaluations rather than an emphasis on overall test scores.

I mean, to be fair my school wasn't all confrontational students and harried teachers, and I imagine it's just the inner city schools in high crime areas that are. It's just a system that's become a haven for indifferent bureaucracy, mediocre standards, and those damn useless tests that teachers have to teach to rather than actually teaching. It's not a post-apocalyptic world for the most part like OH paints, but it's definitely one where actually bettering the youth is secondary to test scores.

Well, you did bring up suicide rates, which is one of the myths that gets pushed by the anti-CCSS crowd. Suicide rates have been increasing at an alarming rate, but to single out CCSS is stupid.

The overwhelming #1 reason for the upward spike of suicides in the last 10 years has been the widespread explosion of social media with kids that are addicted to being on-line 24/7, and unfortunately, many of which fall prey to cyber-bullying.

Also, the phenomenon of Suicide Clusters among teens is still not even remotely understood.

I'm done. Sorry if I crossed any personal lines Hawk.

Boom.