Writing in Huffington Post, historian and teacher John Thompson reviews the dismal failure of high-stakes testing and the inability of its advocates to face reality.

He deplores our current testing regime, which has cost billions of dollars and produced little of value to anyone:

The obvious problem is that Duncan, with the assistance of the Gates Foundation, has already coerced states into changing their laws. By now, I bet, most states would love to toss value-added evaluations into the ash can of history. What lawmakers need is a fig leaf to allow them to undo a rash mistake without getting blamed for having leaped before they looked into the merits of using test score growth to evaluate educators.

The bigger problem, I suspect, is that it would be hard to create a fig leaf huge enough to provide cover for Arne Duncan and Bill Gates, the architects of the sham…