Yay! My boy can take standardized tests!
So what if he's incapable of learning anything else.

Wraithbane: Um, if your boy can't perform on standardized tests....he isn't learning anything else

I see someone missed the point. While it is true that there are people who don't fare well on these sorts of tests despite knowing the material, the big problem here is the false positives this type of system creates.

We are generating children who can do little more than take standardized tests which have essentially zero use in life after high school. But because our nation is increasingly moving towards a single flawed metric for measuring school and teacher performance, there will always be more and more pressure to do nothing in schools but prep for the tests. See the story last year about the girl who was suspended for refusing to answer a question on one of these tests because it would cost the school money, for one example of how silly things have already become.

But to put things in your type of car analogy, what I'm saying is that knowing the traffic laws of your city doesn't mean you can actually drive a car.

Thenixon: i've aced every standardized test they ever threw at me, but it hasn't gotten me a job in the last few months.

You should get a job teaching kids how to ace those tests.

Wraithbane: So the solution isn't to ask any question about the traffic laws?

Yeah. That's exactly what I'm saying.

if they can pass a standardized test, then they did learn something.

If you know the ingredients in a cake, do you know how to bake one?
If you can follow a recipe, can you make up your own recipes?

There's a difference between knowing facts and knowing how to apply them. There's also a difference between knowing procedures and understanding why those procedures work.

To get a bit closer to education, it's a fairly easy thing to teach a kid how to compute basic derivatives of functions. But knowing how to take a derivative doesn't teach anything about what a derivative is, what it represents, or why the procedure for computing them is what it is. And each of these pieces are far more important than knowing just the procedure.

You know, like addition, subtraction, algebra, history...etc.What exactly is it you don't think he'll be able to learn?

They tend to not learn the overarching concepts, see above for one example of what I'm talking about. When I was a kid, I remember my teachers talked a lot about Bloom's Taxonomy (since revised a bit), but it was basically an ordering of the different levels of knowledge/learning that can be achieved.

At the lowest level is simply knowing stuff, facts, dates, how to add a column of numbers. This is the basis for knowledge, but it's not a deep kind of knowledge at all.

After that is the ability to understand what those facts mean 2+2 doesn't just equal 4, but now we know that it's a kind of shorthand for what happens when two objects are introduced to a collection that already has two objects in it.

Next is application, this is where you can take the facts that you know and your understanding of what those facts are, and you can use them in new situations that you haven't already seen. E.g. you know how to add numbers, and then you go to the store and are now able to determine if you have enough money to buy all of the items you want.

Next is the ability to look at some pieces of information and to be able to analyze them and extract patterns. For example, the ability to solve riddles like, Sally likes balloons but hates streamers, likes boots, but hates shoes, likes bells but hates whistles, and likes llamas but hates goats. Would she prefer wallpaper, or paint?

Up next is the ability to combine separate facts to discover new ones. An example of this going back to derivatives and adding a bit of algebraic geometry: if you know what a derivative is, and how to compute it, you can use this knowledge to figure out how to compute where a tangent to any point on a cubic will intersect the cubic again.

Finally, comes the ability to take the knowledge you have and to make reasoned judgments with it, to determine the validity of a hypothesis or scenario.

Now, of these levels in the taxonomy, standardized tests rarely rise above the application level. And the way the tests are being taught to, due to the supposed importance of the tests, this is really being lowered to the first and second levels of knowledge and understanding. The teaches never get around to bolstering the higher levels of learning that are the vital tools for advancing in life beyond the high school level (really junior high, if you ask me). That's what the kids can't learn if they are being taught only to pass these tests.

But hey, if you're cool with that...