The thing is that by the third grade or so, you probably knew why this is bullshit. Every kid is different and picks up information at wildly different rates. Yet you were all hearing the same math lesson, despite the fact that one kid in your row was crying tears of frustration while another cried tears of boredom. So who decided this was the best way to do it?

It turns out that it was concocted nearly wholesale by a committee of ten guys way back in the early 1890s. They were imaginatively known as the Committee of Ten. Before then, schools across the United States were essentially free to teach kids however they wanted, with very mixed results. So in 1894, the Committee of Ten came together with the goal of standardizing the education system across the country, and released a report that shaped the modern concept of schooling in the USA and abroad. That part makes sense -- why not figure out what works and apply it everywhere?

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From here on out, go ahead and assume finger quotes every time the word "works" comes up.

To start, there's the fact that they didn't really make sure it worked first. The committee's report basically turned education into an assembly line. Unless you're an Einstein-level prodigy and get to skip a grade or do really, really badly and get held back, your progress through the school system is more or less decided on the time spent sitting at your desk -- one year equals one "grade." It'd be like an RPG in which leveling up didn't depend on how many orcs you grinded, but simply the number of hours you sat at the computer.

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"I'm gonna grind through Junior Prom, then I'm never buying anything off Greenlight again."

Indeed, the Committee's standardization model (which was later refined by the Carnegie Unit) wasn't intended to maximize the quality of schooling so much as its efficiency -- they wanted to "batch process" kids for higher education. After a set period of time, you either memorize enough facts to go on to college or university, or you don't (in which case, ha ha, fuck you). And this 120-year-old system relies on the ability of every kid going through puberty to fully understand the weight of their own mortality and forward-plan the next 50 years of their life in an age in which free Internet porn exists.

And how do we record how well our kids retain this rote knowledge? Standardized testing, of course! And that brings us to ...

In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education published a report titled "A Nation at Risk," which outlined the growing threat of slipping education results. It was woven with evocative, nationalistic rhetoric such as "educational disarmament" and claimed that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." The report never specifically names the Soviets as the looming foreign educational threat, but considering the context of the time, we're reasonably sure that they weren't talking about France.

This report is widely regarded as the catalyst for the modern test-focused education movement. The nation's largest organization of teachers refers to it as an "obsession with standardized testing" which adds between $700 to $1,000 of cost per student each year. Altogether, students in the US will take an average of 113 fucking standardized tests throughout their primary and secondary school education, all for the sake of desperately trying to outsmart a rival superpower that no longer exists.

Sue Ream
"So does this mean we can finally stop giving the Iowa Test now?"
"If you can think of a way to justify 10,000 unused Scantrons to the school board, then we'll talk."

Of course, the most important question is, again, whether the system works. And the answer is: Ha, of course not. Despite this insane testing schedule, the US has experienced stagnation in achievement, while other countries have been rapidly improving. For example, students in Finland take a grand total of one exam at the end of their entire school experience, and they consistently top worldwide rankings in educational achievement. It's almost as though routine learning and standardized testing aren't the only or even the best way to maximize a human child's education.

Here's where you probably expect us to shame the government for not spending more on our precious children, but it's not that simple ...

The answer is that while schools receive some funding through the federal and state government, nearly half of a school's funding will come from local taxes, usually on real estate. Neighborhoods full of rich people can raise more money than those in the inner city or trailer parks, so kids growing up in an upscale Bay Area suburb will receive a much higher standard of education than kids growing up in Buttfart, Mississippi ... thus ensuring that the rich neighborhoods will stay rich and the poor ones will stay poor.

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"The hole in the floor isn't for show. Every rider must help drive this, Flintstones-style."

And this isn't merely a matter of whether or not they can afford nets for the basketball hoops on the playground; some districts are able to spend several times the national average on their schools. And yes, this class issue quickly turns into a race issue when you consider the brazenly racist housing policies which actively prevented African Americans and other minorities from buying homes in certain neighborhoods. The cycle of poverty among minorities is baked right into the school system. In a country that is supposedly all about inspirational bootstrap success stories, your zip code can all but determine the course of your life.

And yes, you can download a free graphing calculator app for your phone that has even more functionality than your expensive TI hardware. And yet Texas Instruments still somehow accounts for 80 percent of the US market for devices that will draw a hyperbola graph for you when you punch in some numbers. Though some of them do come included with a game of Snake.

Any student can tell you how dumb this is -- how dumb all of this is. But that's the thing ...

But a large body of evidence suggests that the best way to gauge a teacher's performance is to ask their students. If you've been through college, you probably had to do a survey at the end of the semester that rated your lecturer's ability to actually teach you something. So why not do so with high school students? Or earlier? Isn't it at least worth asking them?

It totally is. According to a study conducted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, student surveys are really insightful, as long as you word them in the right way. That means you have to put the questions very simply (these are kids, after all) and you have to convince them that their teacher will never know what they said. If these conditions are met, students wind up giving better feedback about their classroom experience than adult third-party observers (the traditional way to gauge the effectiveness of a classroom).

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Not that the effectiveness of classroom observers is exactly set in stone, either.

And it makes sense, because those observers most likely already know all about Pythagoras' theorem, long division, and I before E except after C. The real metric is to ask the kids, who are the ones in the process of trying to absorb this shit. They're doing trials on this in some states already. At that point, it's as simple as taking their feedback and making changes. Should be no problem.

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If you're looking for more reasons to trust us over your schools, then check out The 5 Most Ridiculous Lies You Were Taught In History Class and 6 Lies About The Human Body You Learned In Kindergarten.

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