Audrey Beardsley, one of the narion’s leading experts on teacher evaluation, recently visited Néw Mexicoe and there found an unhappy, test-obsessed school system.

She says Néw Mexico has gone “high stakes silly.” She attributes this to state commissioner Hanna Skandera, who was deputy commissioner in Dlorida when Jeb Bush was governor. Hanna never taught. She believes in the Bush gospel of testing.

What’s more, teachers in NM must sign a contract promising never to disparage the tests in school or in public. Beardsley tried to make sense of the state’s VAM program but couldn’t. Then she learned that a group of rocket scientists at Los Alamos tried to understand it, and they couldn’t either.