Sorry, Michelle Rhee, but our obsession with testing kids is all about money
Rhee, Nicholas Kristof and Arne Duncan exaggerate test results again to advance an ugly anti-public school agenda
When President George W. Bush asked the American people, back in 2000, “Is our children learning?” left-leaning people everywhere got a big hoot out of it. Little did they know that the joke was on them.
The question not only revealed the inability of our national leaders to manage something as basic as English grammar. It reflected the incoherent means to which American education policy, with the support of Democrats and Republicans alike, would ultimately go about attempting to assess the impact of the country’s entire schooling enterprise.
Beginning with No Child Left Behind in 2001, an elaborate scheme to answer the question, “Is our children learning,” rolled out wave after wave of various assessments across every state in the country.
Results from national diagnostic tests, such as the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), which had previously never made much of a splash outside of academic circles, suddenly became throat-clutching events anticipated with days of media buildup.
Results from obscure international assessments – Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) – suddenly became crucially important “data” for determining the nation’s potential prosperity.
The results of all these exams have now become fodder for nearly every politician and government official to make grandiose claims that their campaign or their administration is “for the kids.”
Economists use the test results to build elaborate spreadsheets to justify all sorts of pronouncements about “what works” in education. And a parade of Very Serious People in