Don’t Be Fooled By Rick Scott’s Clever Rhetoric on High-Stakes Testing | Scathing Purple Musings

Don’t Be Fooled By Rick Scott’s Clever Rhetoric on High-Stakes Testing | Scathing Purple Musings:

Don’t Be Fooled By Rick Scott’s Clever Rhetoric on High-Stakes Testing

by Bob Sikes

Desperate for a PR winner to defend his high-stakes tests regime, Rick Scott may have found one with a simple rhetorical tool: Change the wording. One now. One later.  Let’s take a look:

“Parents and taxpayers expect measurement. We’ve got to measure, we’ve got to find out who the best schools are,” Scott said at a convention of newspaper editors. “We have to have a goodmeasurement system, but we have to make sure we don’t have too much of it.”

Just a few days before, Scott would have used accountability and accountable instead of my emboldened measure and measurement. He and his allies have probably realized “accountability” is making taxpayers cringe as it simply means “high-stakes tests.”
And in Scott’s interview with editors last week he set up the big whopper with, “we have to make sure we don’t