I like that you ignored the latter half.

You don't measure the citizen. You measure the rate at which the country is liberalizing. That is, the rate at which its core philosophical attitude is becoming more individualist, egalitarian, meliorist, and universalist. The purpose of public education is to shift us from the medieval era into the modern era. (And to be clear, being conservative is the opposite of being radical; it does not contradict being liberal. Many things that belong on the political Right are legitimately liberal but not Left.)

How many people are concerned with individual rights? How many people demonstrate equal moral worth and status to all individuals? How many people have a positive outlook on the future? How many people recognize universal qualities in all human beings? The rate at which these indicators are moving is positive, but that rate should be increasing in a country with a strong educational system; you'd ask the questions differently in a different era.

Your goal is now vaguely stated. But how do I actually count the # of people concerned with individual rights/positive outlook/etc?

Education is a way of ensuring a more advanced and productive society through imparting certain knowledge and ideas to its children. The best metric for measuring the performance of an education system is rates of criminality. If a society has high crime rates then its education system is failing to produce productive members.

(See, e.g., Einstein displaying knowledge of quantum mechanics without actually believing it, or assorted creationists who actually understand evolution.)

I think your claim that criminality is the best measure of knowledge is interesting. Among other things, it suggests that the best way to increase knowledge might be to shut down the education system and implement a police state. (For the cost of the current education system we could increase the number of cops/courts/prisons by a factor of 6.)

Actually, an easier way to reduce the crime rate to zero is to repeal all categories of crime. Make it legal to steal and murder. Then all you have are existential crimes: "How could you let this happen!?" types: where crime is a metaphor rather than a fact.

> (For the cost of the current education system we could increase the number of cops/courts/prisons by a factor of 6.)

Citation needed.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2010_US_total

We spend a lot on education, not so much on cops.

What did you think it was?

> Your goal is now vaguely stated. But how do I actually count the # of people concerned with individual rights/positive outlook/etc?

Uh, polling?

Can you tell me why these are good things to prepare people for?

I don't disagree with you, mind. It's just that accusations of indoctrination are responded to in kind.

It seems you don't object to standardized testing at all, but merely to the goals of the current school system (conveying knowledge/skills rather than indoctrination).

No, it's not. Polling is an analysis of a large population through sampling. Standardized testing, in the context we're talking about, is an evaluation of performance based on the performance of a different group.

> It seems you don't object to standardized testing at all, but merely to the goals of the current school system

Here's the funny part. The goals are expressed through the school system. The kind of reform I'd like to see (read: infeasible in the short-term, at least) involve societal upheaval. I can talk about it, as long as you recognize that I've been working for the past few months on trying to figure out a good way of capturing my thoughts and have yet to succeed to my satisfaction.

I can't speak for wpietri, but my opposition to standardized testing is multifarious. For instance, I've experienced its detrimental effects on education firsthand. (In high school, there were a number of interesting topics that we had no time to cover because it was more important to teach to the test. My desire for education reform was born right there.) For the same reason, I dislike grading and GPAs and such. I don't consider this opposition very important, though, because I think we're teaching the wrong things to begin with.

> conveying knowledge/skills

The decision of which pieces of knowledge and which skills to focus on is a political decision and a form of indoctrination. Otherwise, you're not actually conveying anything so much as facilitating the ability to discover/develop knowledge/skills.

I'm confused - what group of people should we be measuring, if not the students exiting the education system?

...there were a number of interesting topics that we had no time to cover because it was more important to teach to the test.

Again, I stand by my claim that your problem is not with standardized tests, but with the goals of the school system. You wanted schools to cover topic B, but the political system decided they must cover A.

The only role the tests played in this story is that they are an effective mechanism for making sure teachers actually do their job.

I am having trouble finding a word in that sentence that isn't wrong.

That's not the only role the play. E.g., they also cause people to spend more time on test prep and less on education.

There isn't just one story here, despite your attempts to pretend that teachers are the only problem and tests are the only solution. Which is the political angle you aim to work.

They are not a particularly effective mechanism. Which is why nobody sane uses standardized tests forevaluating, say, which developers to hire.

They are not an effective mechanism for making sure that teachers actually do their jobs. They could only theoretically cover a small part of the teacher's job, and it's not clear how well they cover that. And they lump together all of the other factors that go into even that small slice of a student's performance.

Can you be specific about what "test prep" means and how it differs from "education"?

Again, many larger companies (e.g., Google, Goldman, MS, DE Shaw) do attempt to standardize their hiring procedures and evaluation methods. But I suppose they are all "insane", right?

If not, I don't see what your point is.

I also don't believe you really don't understand where education and test prep diverge. I think that's a rhetorical technique.

They have collections of questions they ask on interviews, each assigned relative difficulties, and a standardized way to evaluate answers. They ask interviewers to stick to a certain structure, and discard results if an interviewer goes rogue. Standardization is about making sure results are objective and comparable to each other - "fill in the bubbles" is just one particular easy-to-grade method of accomplishing that.

In the past companies (pre Griggs v. Duke Power) did use even more standardized methods, which included "fill in the bubbles", they just don't get too close to completely objective standardized tests due to lawsuit risk.

I also don't believe you really don't understand where education and test prep diverge. I think that's a rhetorical technique.

For a decently designed test (such as the one I linked to) I don't believe they diverge significantly. As I suspected, you are unable to justify your claim that they do.

As to the difference between education and test prep, I'm not unable to justify my position; I'm unwilling to try to do so to you. I don't think you're a serious conversational participant here, by which I mean one who's actually willing to learn anything.

But as a hint, your basic claim is that a fill-in-the-bubble standardized test is a perfect leading indicator for the decades-long effect we expect education to have. And that it can't be manipulated to diverge from that.

That's a very strong claim, and you're obviously smart enough to find the holes in that. You won't, though, because your whole MO on HN is as relentless debater on a pretty narrow set of political points.

You really only care about those standardized tests, don't you? Any other point of interest just sort of gets ignored.

My point is that NCLB is scientific in the same way Taylorism was: it's a cargo cult activity that takes on the trappings of science and looks for something easy to measure. And then uses those measures in ways that aren't scientifically validated at all.

That's fine - you've just adopted a different philosophy, one of the "other ways of knowing" rather than science.

My point is that NCLB...

I'm not arguing for NCLB, I'm arguing that objective, comparable and reproducible measurements are the only viable way to optimize a system.

If you want to argue some specific metric is flawed, do it. Explain what should be measured and how the particular metric differs from it (i.e., details). So far, not a single person in this thread has actually done that - the closest we came was this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713558

I would love it if we did proper science with education. I would love it if we did it with software development. In neither case has anybody put forward sufficient resources to do real science in these realms. Not science sufficient to replace human judgment.

Until we can, I don't think cargo cult science is the way to go. Half-assed studies on software development methods, counting simple metrics for developers, measuring teachers through simple standardized tests: all cargo cult science.

For now, I'd much rather rely explicitly on human judgment. It's not as good as actual science, but it's much better than pseudoscience.