Atlanta: Bellwether Or Whistleblower For Test-Driven Reform?
Early in the life of No Child Left Behind, one amateur but insightful futurist on the Shanker Institute Board remarked to me: “Well, if you tie teacher pay, labeling failing schools, and evaluations of teachers and principals all to student test results—guess what?—you’ll get student test results. But some 20, years down the road when these kids get out of high school, we may discover they don’t know anything.”
The quip did not necessarily suggest that we were headed for massive cheating scandals. Nor did it mean that students should never be assessed to find out how well they were learning what had been taught. It was just a warning that the incentives to produce score results would produce them —one way or another—and whether or not they stood for any true reflection on learning. Meaning, in this case, that a system that defines success narrowly in terms of test score gains will, at minimum, invite exaggerated claims and, at worst, encourage corruption.
An important report was released this spring that should bring some U. S. education “reformers” up short as they