CURMUDGUCATION: Duncan Cheers Failing Scores

CURMUDGUCATION: Duncan Cheers Failing Scores:

Duncan Cheers Failing Scores

Arne Duncan's Big Bus Tour was practically in my neighborhood as the Duncanator stopped at Carnegie Mellon to make some general mouth noises and to continue what is apparently a theme of the trip, which is, "Hooray for failing test scores on the Common Core Big Standardized Tests!"

Pennsylvania is a good place to make that pitch, because our test scores just drove off a cliff. If the results are to be believed, 70% of Pennsylvania's eighth graders are mathematical boneheads!

Speaking of boneheads, here are some of the things that Duncan doesn't understand.

“Obviously, students aren’t going to be less smart than they were six months ago or a year ago,” Mr. Duncan said. “In far too many states, including Pennsylvania, politicians dummied down standards to make themselves look good.”

Well, first of all, nobody dummied down standards. They messed with the cut scores for the BS Tests, but damn, Arne-- if you can't keep straight the difference between the standards and the tests, you can't get upset when other people don't pretend they're different, either. 

But sure. The fiddling with test scores under No Child Left Behind wasn't about states trying desperately to avoid punitive measures made inevitable by a politically set stupid goal. "Get 100% of your students above average by 2014, or we will cut your federal financial support off at the knees," said the feds. This guaranteed that by 2014 there would be only two types of school districts in the country-- districts that were failing, and districts that were lying.

There are so many lessons to learn from this, and Duncan didn't learn any of them. Setting cut scores by political rather than educational means is a fool's game-- but under Duncan, that's still how the CURMUDGUCATION: Duncan Cheers Failing Scores: