The 3Rs - Ridiculous Regulated Rubbish

Just about everyone thinks of Reuse, Reduce and Recycle when "the 3 Rs" are mentioned these days. Everyone, that is, except the British Government who still, inexplicably,  refer to primary education as "the three Rs" even though only one of them now begins with R (reading  writing and maths).

In addition to introducing the school "league tables", as if education was a sport, the Conservative Government has now increased the level of difficulty of the standardized tests they give to primary school (elementary school)  children which means, somewhat obviously, that the scores of students are going to be lower than they were with the old test last year. Just last week I blogged about how tests only measure other tests, an assertion that seems well supported by the British Government's latest advice to parents to "ignore the latest test results".

Unlike Canada, where each minister is an expert in her or his field, the British (and US) governments appear to revel in the idea of putting people in charge of things about which they know nothing. Nick Gibbs, the current Minister of State for Schools at the DfE in the UK was an accountant before he became a politician. It seems remarkable that schools and children are compared using tests that measure a narrowly defined set of skills and knowledge at a particular moment in time using a specific medium and think that anything useful can be obtained.

To then say that only 53% of children "meet the standard" is absolute Ridiculous, Regulated Rubbish.