Good education is like great education only because they are both an education. A great education it takes the long view, and relentlessly focuses on delivering to students the ability to think. This is not simply to ability look stuff up on Google, but the ability to rational sift and diverge from convention to see relationships everyone else said what not there.
Such an education is the opposite of modern assembly line education. Mass education is a standardized test competition. The Students that conforms best to the academic definition of intelligence win the conformity prize. The standardized curriculum taught in a standardized classroom to train students for standardized tests weeds out the remarkable, innovative, different thinkers for failure to fit on the assembly line. The irony is the system is failing to meet its own measure of success the standardized test scores.
Some who work in education are now addicted to today's education emergency symptoms to avoid facing the problem. It could be a the decline in SAT/ACT scores or local state testing scores like Florida's FCAT, the growing unpreparedness of high school students for college and careers, college graduation debt exceeding $25,000, the increased time it takes graduate from college, and to land not just a job, but a career. The faux scandal or merely the symptom of the education emergency, namely, declining standardized test scores hides the real problem. Standardized testing is not educating or measuring the ability to make something it is the perfect education methodology for boring students to death.
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One side effect of the endless education emergency is an insatiable need for cash. More money for teachers, technology, textbooks, and testing. Assembly line education investment doesn't scale. We can put larger numbers through the system. We can increase the data dump on students. We can accelerate the pace. Even if the education assembly line was inspiring to students ignited the desire learn on purpose so they were fully alive and engaged would we produce creative thinkers or cogs that show up and follow the rules?
The problem with the education emergency is the focus on the symptom standardized test score rather than the education accompany like paradigm itself.