Whats up with education

A while ago, Congress passed a series of bills in order to aid education in the dismal schools that report bad scores in order to boost the children’s future. The deal would be that if test scores went up, the schools and area would receive federal aid. This would therefore encourage state politicians and schools to amp up their education program. They may only be doing for the money or just do to embarrassment, but at least the children would be better off in the end. However, the states have found a couple of loopholes around this system so that they could receive aid without having to provide increases in education. The state education system has done this by “devising weak tests, setting low passing scores or changing tests from year to year to prevent accurate comparisons over time.”, and to voters this all looks great and believe the system is working when it is actually not. These practices have been uncovered by research done by “Stanford University and the University of California, that analyzed the testing practices of a dozen states between 1992 and 2006. States that performed swimmingly on their own weak math and reading tests tended to score dismally on the more rigorous federal National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as NAEP.” Also, they will oppose any national test so that the true scores cannot be discovered. The question is how to find out how to implement money for real scores. One way to do this would be to provide a free national test that is more rigorous to show the true scores, and then distribute money according to those scores. This is because of the very weak tests the states give, “In nearly all of the states studied, students did noticeably worse on federal tests than on state tests. In Oklahoma, the gap in scores was a shocking 60 percentage points in math and 51 percentage points in reading. In Texas, that gap was 52 percentage points in math and 56 points in reading. The state that came closest to the federal standard was Massachusetts, where there was a modest 1 percent gap in math and 10 percent gap in reading.” This is awful in my opinion, that instead of trying to fix a system, people would just try to dupe the voters just to get money at the expense of children. It really shows the possible corruption in the local governments. This is not how it should work, states should try to increase scores regardless of rewards; they should just do it for the children. It is truly disgusting that this level of greed exists in the government, and I myself fell used as a voter.