I have blogged before about Texas and its need to test. "There's a test for that" should replace "Don't mess with Texas" on billboards. I came across another article about Texas and its testing. The part that caught my attention was the amount of money being poured into this obsession with testing.
Matt Rourke
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
The state spends $80 million a year to develop and administer its tests. Educators try to ensure that questions are the appropriate difficulty level and cover material students should know.
The article mostly talks about how much effort is being placed on test design. The TAKS in high school is being replaced by end of the year exams. Eighty million a year seems like a lot to me. What if they tried an experiment where they put this money to work in the schools instead of developing and implementing new test designs? Wow! Could this be what private schools are doing with their money?