is the title of this blog at Education Week by Marc Tucker.  Diane Ravitch calls it the best thing she has ever read by Tucker, who is  the president and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy and an internationally recognized expert on education reform and a leader in benchmarking the policies and practices of the countries with the best education systems in the world. (background courtesy of this Wikipedia entry).  In short, Tucker is eminent in education, and is considered very much of a centrist.   Thus what he writes SHOULD carry great weight for anyone paying attention, who really cares about attempting to do what is best for our schools and our students.
He begins his post with these two paragraphs:
In my last blog, I pointed to the data that shows that, after 10 years of federal education policies based on test-based accountability, there has been no perceptible improvement in student performance among high school students (which, when you get right down to it, is what really matters) as a whole, or when the data are broken down by different groupings of disadvantaged students.  There is little doubt—whether test-based accountability is being used to hold schools accountable or individual teachers—that it has failed to improve student performance.
That should be reason enough to abandon it.  But it is not.  The damage that test-based accountability has done goes far deeper than a missed opportunity to improve student achievement.  It is doing untold damage to the profession of teaching.
And lest anyone have any doubt, you are NOT going to effectively educate our children without dedicated, and effective, teachers.  The real effect we teachers have is NOT the raising of