Why Is The Monkey A Lie?

Quote to get an audience pumped up in five syllables as suggested by John Oliver:

“Here comes the monkey!” Another quote to confuse the same audience in seven syllables as written by a geeky smart alek who knows the context of the quote: “The monkey is a lie.”

Why is the monkey a lie, you may ask. Because my dear reader, he seeks to pump you up for the one thing almost every student can agree is a terrible idea: standardized tests.

Now everything has been done to these tests in attempt to make them more tolerable; they’ve been taken, skipped, enforced, cheated on, changed, taught, even puked on enough that there is now a procedure in almost every test administrator’s instruction manual on what to do if a student were to puke on his or her

This system directly links test scores to teacher pay, meaning that if a student scores higher than he or she did last year, this year’s teacher would receive a better rating, and thus better pay. But if a student scores lower than he or she did last year, or doesn’t improve enough, that student would lower the teacher’s rating; even if that student got every question correct, he or she could still count against the teacher if his or her predicted score is higher than the possible score (this actually happens more often than you would think).

This could force great teachers out of the field, and some less honest educators to more drastic measures. In 2009, eleven educators were convicted of changing students’ test answers in order to receive a better score, this was later called the Atlanta Scandal. Some schools cut down maybe even cancel recess to teach the test, or even teach the test all day instead of real life application.

And do you know the worst part? It’s not helping! When the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reported the scores for 2012, they were similar to the scores of 1999 where the US was rated 28th out of 40 countries