It's Test Day

It's TAKS day here in Snyder. I awoke this morning to the smell of bacon and eggs...yes, mom cooked a good breakfast for the kids.

TAKS is our statewide assesment of knowledge and skills. It's a benchmark test where they can measure a child's progress and a school's effectiveness. It's the scorecard for the educational system.

I'm all for measuring our kids progress, but my fear is that we are teaching the test and not the knowledge behind the test. I've seen my kids have to add simple numbers together and have to count the dots on the number to add them together. What happened to the day when you had to know your addition, subtraction and mulitiplication by memory? There are other examples, but I have family in the education system and they tell me that this is happening. So much so that kids who focus so much on science and math in the early grades are poor grammar students in the later years.

It's TAKS day in Texas and I hope that in the end the next generation is better for it. We'll wait and see.