You may or may not be familiar with the crap that comes from Google Translate. Chinese, for example, doesn't have the same structure as English. I often read things that come through there, though, and parts of speech are wrong, syntax is wrong, usage is wrong, and sometimes passages are barely coherent. Sometimes they aren't coherent at all. Spanish is closer to English in some respects, but as I tell my students--Spanish is Spanish. English is English. That's how I explain differences that don't, at first blush, appear logical.
Logic doesn't necessarily apply to language. Prepositions, for example, are fairly arbitrary, and don't make sense from one language to the next. Advanced speakers often make prepositional errors. English spelling is not logical at all. It seems natural to us, but it isn't. Spanish, for example, is almost completely phonetic. What you see is what you get.
As illogical as language is, though, it's a distant second to our testing system. The mandate that we cannot grade our own students is offensive, counterproductive, and stupid. The assumption is that we will boost the grades of our own students so as to make ourselves look better. That may be a good assumption in schools where teachers are pressured to pass everyone no matter what. However, the issue in schools like that is corrupt administration. There's a longstanding tradition in New York City to never, ever address that (unless you're Sue Edelman). Even the very worst principals are simply reassigned to Tweed to sit around and do Whatever It Is they do there.
The assumption that I will be biased toward my students, or you to yours, suggests that I am corrupt and unfit (as are you). Well, if that's the case, why the hell did they hire us in the first place? If we are inclined to pass people for no reason, we are of no earthly use to our students or school system. I've just looked at my final grades, and it turns out that kids who failed all the tests, kids who cut rather than take them, and kids who failed to do any work failed my classes. Why, then, would I be so desperate to pass them on some standardized test?
Now I know a lot of my colleagues are more than happy to get paid for grading, something we used to do as part of our job. I can't say I miss traveling to other schools to grade the exams of students I've never seen, or negotiate grades with people I've never met. Wouldn't it be better, though, if the city took all that money and devoted it to something worthwhile, like class size reduction? Isn't that one of the only things we know to actually improve education? And how do ostensible leaders like the mayor and chancellor get up in public and claim to care about schoolchildren when they aren't willing to devote money to improving education? Is scapegoating teachers and acceptable substitute? I don't think so.
Back to testing, we haven't really examined the question of why they're taking standardized tests at all. Wouldn't it be more reasonable for me to test them on what I actually taught them, as opposed to whatever the Board of Regents happened to pull out of their collective behinds? I am not an expert on all the standardized tests, but I've given some serious consideration to the English Regents exams, and it's a piece of crap that measures neither reading, writing, or any English ability I can discern. Despite the absence of the name, all it really tests is Common Coriness, a skill in which I can discern no highly practical application.
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