Fair point. Unfortunately I'm not able to properly hunt anything down right now, other than remembering Dan Pink references a few in his book Drive. But does it really seem like that much of a stretch to say that a single high pressure multiple choice test is a worse indicator of ability than a larger number of lower pressure tests? I'd also point out that your be detector doesn't seem to detect anything about the idea that standardized tests are a good metric despite the fact that you haven't cited anything either. Perhaps you mistakenly bought a mislabeled conflicts-with-by-bias detector?

"It is not acceptable to assume that it "just works" in the absence of evidence." No argument there, but where's the evidence that standardized tests are a valid metric for students, let alone entire schools? There are piles of studies that show increasing pressure results in poorer than normal performance. I don't see any reason to believe that high stakes testing is a valuable metric for anything; their use also relies on unconfirmed and dubious assumptions. As to sorting out where things are applicable and where they are not, again I can't argue, but... how do we separate when something is useful by itself and when it's only useful in conjunction with other factors? For example, what if smaller class sizes are only useful if you take advantage of the fact that they enable differentiated instruction? I'm reluctant to rely on a gut feeling of what "should" work, but how much better is a study that doesn't look at its data in context? (And of course, I don't know that it didn't, but these are some of the things I'd like to see addressed off the top of my head).

I'm suspicious of the validity of these studies if their metric was standardized testing, which don't measure very much I'm interested in for my children. Also, how do you conclude that there's no benefit, and then go on to explain the real reason for those nonexistent benefits?

Ew ew ew ew ew...

What if you don't understand humor? Is Slashdot the right site for you then?

So according to this, dogs are responsible for the birth of civilization and they were the ones who domesticated us. By extension, doesn't that mean that civilization began in Soviet Russia?

Hire a dominatrix.

Replace the word "programmers" with almost anything and this is still true.

You make a valid point, but you see the same thing in a lot of fields. I work in pharma where lab personel are comparatively well paid. The same people doing the exact same thing in a less profitable industry are not as well paid, as reported by my coworkers who made the switch (of course the trade off is the lack of stability in pharma). Perhaps the difference is that with food service, we're in direct control of how much the server is getting paid.

While I am possibly the least qualified reader of Slashdot to attempt to answer this question, my guess it that it's the same reason I have trouble telling my boss when I'll have a given task or project done. Namely that different parts of the project take different amounts of time depending on difficulty, some of those processes are dependent on yet other processes that I can't directly measure myself (because others are involved), and because background processes occasionally spring up as a high priority event that interupts what it is you're asking me to measure (occasionally even causing me to never get back to the original process).

My sarcasm detector is broken. Are you actually saying that you think the world would benefit from more ignorance?

Really? You consider this a solved problem based on the information that was available in the 19th century? Do you also go see a doctor that relies on 19th century medical practices without any of the ridiculous new discoveries like that "germ theory" nonsense?

Considering that you have the chance of losing everything by not having this, and that you lost nothing at all by having it, I see no reason not to have a tracking device on your child.

That's probably the best explanation I've heard for this yet.