The Way Literacy Tests

As an international student, one of my assumptions about American education system was that things could be different from those in Korea. So far, I’ve been feeling that they are not so much different from each other. One reason that I came over to study here is that I did not really like the test-centered school curriculum in my country. As in the book (LL), teaching in the academy is fundamentally an activity shaped by and constrained by bureaucracy (5). To my disappointment, my experience as a teacher and as a student tells me that teachers seem to struggle under such oppressively standardized conditions almost everywhere. I left my home country with the same question that the author keeps asking, “How one can possibly effect change in a system so profoundly shaped by and dependent upon maintaining the status quo?” Through observations and tutoring at an elementary and secondary schools, I found out that my question may be too big to handle, and the only thing I, as a teacher, could do is to keep myself aware of what students need -test skills or content knowledge – and find ways to do this within the curriculum.