Nonsense about Superintendent Joshua Starr
(Katherine Frey/THE WASHINGTON POST)
Montgomery County Schools Superintendent Joshua Starr has been a thoughtful critic of the excesses of the modern reform movement, and for that, of course, he is now the object of gratuitous attack. Starr recently said that the country would be better off with a three-year moratorium on standardized testing than a continuation of the current insanity that uses test scores to evaluate not only students and schools but teachers with formulas that are unreliable and invalid. Here, award-winning school Principal Carol Burris, who has documented the problems with New York state’s new teacher evaluation system, talks about Starr and his history.
By Carol Burris
I am no longer surprised by the narrow view of school improvement that is held by those who believe in test-based school reform. Their playbook never varies—its strategies are high stakes testing, school choice, evaluation of teachers by test scores, online learning, and