The obvious problem is that Duncan, with the assistance of the Gates Foundation, has already coerced states into changing their laws.
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…
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