Pencils Down: Introduction: Why We Need to Rethink High-Stakes Assessment and Accountability | Seattle Education

Pencils Down: Introduction: Why We Need to Rethink High-Stakes Assessment and Accountability | Seattle Education:

Pencils Down: Introduction: Why We Need to Rethink High-Stakes Assessment and Accountability

by seattleducation2011

Rethinking Schools has just come out with its latest publication Pencils Down edited by Wayne Au and Melissa Bollow Tempel.
To follow is the introduction to the book.

In 2000, Rethinking Schools published Failing Our Kids: Why the Testing Craze Won’t Fix Our Schools. In that volume, editors Kathy Williams (then Swope) and Barbara Miner pulled together a groundbreaking collection of essays, letters, articles, and analyses that challenged the juggernaut of high-stakes testing and accountability in public education policy.
And we thought things were bad then…
We now live in a world after the bipartisan passage of NCLB. The tsunami of high-stakes testing and accountability has crashed on our educational shores with full force-threatening the foundations of teaching and learning, as well as the democratic aspirations of public education.
Those of us who held even the slimmest hope that changes in presidential administrations might stem or