It's that time of year again, time for students, teachers and parents all over the country to feel a tremendous amount of stress and anxiety over standardized testing.
But is all of it worth it? John Oliver's latest rant on Sunday night's episode of Last Week Tonight seems to suggest otherwise.
The 1990s brought with it an influx of standardized testing when the United States ranked toward the bottom on international tests. In response to this, President George W. Bush introduced his No Child Left Behind program on just his third day in office. The program famously entails testing students every year in order to see which schools are not meeting state education standards and remedy that. Accountability is the name of the game.
And while few can argue with the intention of the program, its execution has been much more controversial. The fact that states use students' performance on standardized testing to evaluate teachers, several test questions have been found to be flawed or make absolutely no sense, such as one reading comprehension passage about a race between a hare and a seemingly magical pineapple that only The Doors would approve of, and the rushed and sometimes inaccurate grading by scorers found on Craigslist are just a few reasons Oliver gives for why standardized testing has become a contentious subject.
Perhaps all of that is why test administrators are specifically instructed on what to do if a student vomits on his or her test booklet. You may be feeling a little sick about all of this too.
However, it could actually get worse. One glaring omission from Oliver's Last Week Tonight top story was the possibility of educators feeling so much pressure for their students to perform well on these tests that they would be driven to cheat, like the 11 educators from Atlanta Public Schools who were recently convicted of racketeering and other crimes associated with the so-called Atlanta cheating scandal involving changing, fabricating and falsely certifying answers on state standardized tests.
But if all of this is just too depressing for you, don't worry. Oliver has four words that will cheer you up: Here comes the monkey. No matter what the situation is, that always seems to do the trick. You'll see why when you watch the full Last Week Tonight segment below.
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