Having spent the last year in a classroom with a room full of 1st and 2nd grade students, I have come to the conclusion that from my experience standardized testing is both a horrible metric to measure children's abilities and an added, unneeded stress on the students.

There was one student in our class who was very good at arithmetic. I mean he wasn't Gauss but he was very quick to learn any new methods or mathematics that I would give him. This second grader was both eager to learn and show me what he had learned. He had wanted to start doing multiplication (and I did give him some opportunities to do so, which he once again succeeded at). Then when given the standardized tests, he scored much lower than the rest of the class.

Other students who were reading books made for older students, scored low on the reading metrics.

This was insane to me. It was absolutely mind boggling. Every day I came in and I saw that these kids were learning. I saw that they understood fractions. I saw that they understood adding more than one digit. I saw that they could sound out words they did not know and that they could use context for those words.

Yet they did poorly on the test.

I am not a teacher, I simply was assisting in the classroom with my wife who is, and she was not even allowed to look at the test after the kids were done. She was not allowed to see the content.

I know I know "The plural of anecdote is not data" and to be honest I haven't read studies about the effectiveness of standardized testing in the classroom.

The prayer from the administration is simply "Teach the curriculum" whatever that means. Kids need teachers who are flexible about their learning. Not administrators who simply want to see improvement to gain more grant money.

I really could go on and on. My time spent in the classroom was bittersweet, the children while sometimes rude and offensive, were always less contemptible than the mysterious administration who held impossible standards from behind a curtain that teachers are not allowed to look behind.

America's education system is backwards. Teachers need to be running the classrooms, and the administration should be fulfilling their needs.

I dunno what to call it so I'll just use a vague term: "the system" these days has these kinds of problem, I've noticed. I'm talking more than just schools and tests here. I notice this in all aspects of life, like, say, buying from Wal-Mart instead of a mom and pop store.

They're set up so that no matter what you're always potentially hurting someone. If you opt out you can potentially hurt teachers and schools. If you stay in... You still hurt them by participating in a system that you don't believe in, and if you believe it's best for your children's educational well-being to opt out, you're obviously hurting them as well.

Maybe that's why we find the trolley problem so compelling: Many choices in our lives in the systems we live in have similar kind of scenarios. The trolley problem is also set up so that it always has one "lesser of two evils" choice that people think we should lean towards, like in this instance the choice of letting the kids stay to help the teachers and schools, which would correspond to killing one dude to save five on the other side of the tracks.

Or not; I dunno. Maybe I'm just being stupid and comparing things that shouldn't be compared.