An alleged cheating scandal in Washington D.C., and the recent, actual cheating scandal in Atlanta have opponents of accountability and reform lined up to decry the use of student assessment exams to measure teacher effectiveness. These guardians of the status quo are out in force, and have now deftly hijacked the student examination “process”. These folks now deridingly refer to the common practice of examining students for skills mastery assessment as “high stakes testing” “dumbing down education”, or “teaching to the test”. Somehow, this group has managed to make “testing” a dirty word. Grasping at straws to defile the practice of student testing further, many of this mindset argue that the utilization of test data for teacher evaluations will lead to more cheating in more school districts.
Funny how all this fear-mongering anger is just now coming to the surface, though. Standardized testing has been performed in America for decades, and for all this time as the resultant data showed that our students were learning less and less compared to their peers in other nations (even as public school expenditures were rising exponentially), nobody thought testing was so bad. But nothing was changing, American education policy was stuck in the mud, more money was being spent, yet we were still falling behind countries like China.
So “A Nation at Risk” came along in the 1980s, and in 2002 Ted Kennedy’s No Child Left Behind was enacted. And now, in 2011,
