Juxtapositions

One of the primary goals of standardized testing has been to give everyone an equal opportunity to succeed in school. While that's a wonderful goal, it must be noted that zip code is still the most accurate way to predict academic success. Why is this? There are plenty of explanations (or attempts at explanations).... and I'm not going to go into these in any detail here. Instead, I'd like to consider they way that our general approach to education that relies on standard knowledge, standard assessment, and increasingly standard teaching methods (both in the U.S. and Korea) might be turning English into something it isn't... a set of patterns and forms that can be divided into an ordered curriculum. I wonder if these structural issues have anything to do with the resistance to English among some Korean students and high levels of English success among others.

Here's a website that discusses the achievement gap in the U.S.