Except that in the real world of teaching, this is what is actually happening:
Students are being taught test-taking strategies rather than content. Rather than being taught how to read and how to understand a passage, the “tally method” has been developed, where students are taught to simply count the words, and whichever word occurs most and matches one of answers, that is the “main idea.”
When I was teaching middle and high school English, I was told not to teach poetry or novels, but only very short pieces — especially essays — because only short essays would be on the test.
So when people talk about teaching to the test, they mean that content is being thrown out for test-taking strategies that have nothing to do with learning any sort of content. Education has been moving away from content toward more and more contentless strucutures and methods of “how to learn,” which NCLB only makes worse.
NCLB is a complete disaster, culminating the disastrous direction education has been going. Education has been getting worse and worse the more it has become federalized, and NCLB has only made things worse. If its purpose was to prove that the federal government is all but worthless at helping anything improve, then it did its job.
