I'm glad I'm an anarchist. I don't care for any of this baseless argument, and funny enough most anything that leans into a political side is usually baseless.

I'll smile big and wide when you all blow the world up.

Yeah. I'll be sittin' on my lawn chair with my bottle of wine and my shotgun watching that eventual nuclear apocalypse headin' in my direction, all right.

How many fortune cookie fortunes are you going to qoute?

The United States seems to be caught up in measurement mania when it comes to literacy. The No Child Left Behind law calls for extensive testing of children's reading abilities in different grade levels. For adults, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) has developed adult literacy tests, while Title 2: The Adult Education and Family Literacy Act of the WorkforceInvestment Act of 1998 calls for accountability measures that the DOE has implemented in a national reporting system that makes extensive use of adult literacy tests.

The actual measurement instruments and procedures for measuring reading/literacy and comparing states suffer from major flaws. They all follow different procedures in their development, which renders them incomparable, hence interpretations of data produced by comparing the various tests are essentially meaningless.

Testing children's reading achievement

Last year, on page 39 of the June 4, 2008 issue of Time magazine a graph was presented showing differences between the percentage of fourth graders in each state who are deemed "proficient" in reading based on each state's different standardized test. The graph also shows the percentage deemed "proficient" on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is a standardized test given in all states. There are some very significant differences between the state and national test results. For instance, Mississippi reports that nearly 90 percent of fourth graders are proficient in reading on the state-developed test, while on the NAEP only about 19 percent score as proficient. This is a whopping 71 percentage points difference.

The Time article reported that when using state test data the average percentage of fourth graders considered proficient is 70%. On the national NAEP tests only 30% of U.S. fourth graders score as proficient. This is a 40-point average gap between state and national estimates of fourth-grade reading proficiency. The state and national tests use different procedures to determine if children are proficient readers; hence they are not commensurate. This raises these questions. Which tests should be considered valid indicators of the reading achievement level of the nation's fourth-graders? Should it be, the state or the federal tests - or perhaps neither?

Testing adult's literacy levels

Jumping ahead to when fourth graders have grown up, the 2008 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) presents data for prose and document literacy that indicate that in 1992 15% of adults over the age of 16 scored as proficient on these tests. In 2008, 6% of adults scored as proficient, a drop of 9%. Surprisingly, only 20% of adult college graduates scored as proficient in literacy.

This suggests a tremendous loss of proficiency as children grow into adulthood!

Measuring literacy for accountability

The problem of assessing literacy also shows up in the accountability system of the nation's Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS), which is made up of some 3,000 programs funded jointly by federal money from Title 2 of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 and state and local funds.

The National Reporting System (NRS) which prepares reports on how well adults are learning to read in the AELS, has acknowledged that different states use different standardized tests, with differing amounts of time between pre- and posttests to assess growth in literacy learning. But despite the acknowledged lack of comparability in the tests and procedures used in various states, the NRS computes averages of the percentage of adults making learning gains throughout the 50 states. Of course, the lack of comparability in measurement tools and their administration renders these data totally meaningless and useless to Congress (or anyone else for that matter) in deciding whether or not states are using their federal funds responsibly and productively.

The debacle of testing literacy ability

Despite the faults of testing for literacy skills, there is apparently no hesitancy in using the test results to reward some educators and punish others for what they are doing to teach literacy, whether to children or adults. Despite extensive use of standardized tests of various sorts by the 50 states, 30-year reading trend data with the NAEP show minimal if any improvement for 9-, 13-, or 17-year-old children since the early 1970s.
Further, the testing of adult literacy in 1992 and again in 2007 shows little or no improvement in literacy at the lowest levels and a decline at the highest levels.

To date, then, the great literacy testing debacle has cost hundreds of millions of dollars, threatened teachers and administrators, subjected children to hours of drill and practice in test taking rather than engaging in learning important content and skills, and cast aspersions on the literacy skills of America's workforce, thus advertising to the world that the U. S. workforce is incompetent. This cannot be good for the health and welfare of the nation or its international competitiveness in the global economy.

Even if we could get literacy testing right - which we have not done up to now - there is no way we can test ourselves out of the serious educational problems that afflict our K-12 and adult literacy education systems.

There is a word for the obsessive repetition of utterly foolish, unreasonable, and failed practices: insanity.

*Published USA Govt article

Amen

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do

I took a Strengths Test once, this is what mine said...

1.)Accuracy...will land a shot placement within a 2" group at a mile even while being drunk.

2.)Precision...will land the second shot placement within .005" of the first shot.

3.)Patience...will wait until your friends come running before placing and landing my next shot placements within a 2" group at a mile while getting even drunker and looking at a porno mag.

Dude, email this crap to the Whitehouse. And, tell Obama to quit eating my 401k!

The book series you refer to all started with the original book by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman called "First Break all the rules; What the World's Greatest Managers Do Best".

The concept of strengths is this series was designed so that the managers would realize that asking someone to work in an area or do a job that was in the area of a persons personal weakness was not being a good manager for the person or the business.

The second two books, are more about the individual realizing that everyone has areas of greater strength and areas that are more difficult, regardless of what it is that person does. Buckingham and Clifton wrote the second book, and Buckingham wrote the third book by himself.

Regardless if a person has a "strength" in an area or not, it does not always translate into that person being able to communicate or deliver that strength in a respectful and productive way.

The books are all three good reads and along with a persons own personal passion and goals, they can help some people realize why things are more difficult in certain areas than others...

None of these books talk about the basic aspect of respect for people in general and treating people with respect and dignity, whatever their strength may or may not be...

Amazing ... all turned true?

No, they were all wrong. I can shoot even farther and group them the same. My own assessment is what counted...studying the United States Army Target Interdiction Course Sniper Training and Employment, The United States Navy Seal Sniper Target Acquizition Course, The United States Nave Seal Sniper Training Manual, The United States Marine Corp Scout/Sniper Training Manual, and The SWAT Counter Sniper Target Interdiction Course alnong with alot of materials I have memorized.

Alfred...what is it you are trying to achieve here?

I wonder if you have taken the time to notice, most of the posters here, talk TO each other, not AT each other...

you have laid a sermon down.... and seem upset at the responses you receive...

if you want to preach your stuff, religion is about three quarters down the main wall of the community section.

If you would rather INTERACT, which surprisingly, happens on a dating/social site...

perhaps share you insights and ask questions...

I didnt cope with having other people's ideals shoved down my neck at school, nor do I tolerate it now...

just a thought.........

Now there's a sweet thought.

"India, however, thanks to those dreadful British colonialists, has a superb, old-fashioned, English language-based education system in which students still learn the essentials of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. And it turns out that those skills are highly marketable--as they would be in the United States if anyone still had them."

Above is the OP's quote

Granted, we need to improve language and grammar skills. Your arguments aren't effective when you make a generalized statement that no one in the United States has the essential grammar skills
necessary to be marketable. Surely, one or two of us must know enough to be gainfully employed.

Good thought... but why when i disagree it seems to be shoving down your neck? You can ignore and move on...

................ There is nothing swifter than an evil rumour.

..and we can state our comments and replies when we don't ignore and move on. That's something that we Americans wrote very well, "Our Freedom of Speech". When it comes to vocabulary, we even know sign language, hell we can even improvise and speak using one finger!

Alfred you have made 20 posts... and of those 20 at least five, maybe six were threads created by you, with an opening post, dictating your ideals....

No questions, no request for imput, nothing...

and when you have had any kind of input from other posters, you have scorned them... example, Science and Philosophy section, your Life after Death thread...your original post, then one condemning post , to a poster's response...

My understanding of your culture, is one of politeness, and respectful interaction....

What is it you seek here? To share?

Or to dictate?

Ahem, some of us are outspoken aussies and Brits, also.....

And so can they! Except they do it with more style, they do it while drinking Foster's!