Eric Smith’s Airy Dismissive Evasion of Testing Critics
Jeffrey Solocheck finally tracked down former Florida ed commissioner Eric Smith. Solochek does a good job of probing Smith and this exchange caught my eye:
Does it create the need for too many tests? Because I’ve heard districts talk about having testing almost every day of the school year for one grade level or another.
You know, I started as a teacher 40 years ago. We didn’t have state accountability back in those days. But we did give tests every week, in every class as far as I knew. What the change is, isn’t more testing, because we’ve always tested in our schools. It’s giving the tests that we give more meaning and more purpose. …
What rubish! And Smith knows it, too.
Smith, who seeks to establish credibility by pointing out that he was a teacher, knows that the tests he gave –
