Ed Secretary Margaret Spelling addressed the American Federation of Teachers and said the administration is willing to alter how states measure progress under the NCLB act. The current system is irrational at best and the administration is giving into a lot of pressure–including pressure from suburban Republicans.
While I’m very critical of NCLB, I also recognize the need to have yearly testing. While high stakes testing has many problems, there are no other objective tools to measure performance. By adjusting how that data is used, one hopes that the system will be returned to being rational.
Education is not a business, so business’ obsession with performance measures is not an appropriate yardstick to use. And high-stakes testing is not an objective measure of anything except the ability of students to take high-stakes tests. Just ask anybody who teaches in college whether students do better now that they’ve had to take and pass those ridiculous things in order to graduate. (The opposite appears to be true; so much time is spent teaching to the test that students never have the opportunity to acquire the factual knowledge, much less the ability to reason critically and use that factual knowledge to create new knowledge.)