It was a powerful thing on the Ellipse of the Mall with the White House in the background and the Capitol down the road.
It was powerful for the very fact that it started as the idea who have for so many years called for a return to sanity – the radically sane idea of using test scores to measure no more than what they were designed to measure.
So many of us over the years have called for a rejection of the insanity of making stuff up and pretending that some standardized test is all you need to tell the worth of a child, her teacher or an entire school system.
When test scores go up, we do not applaud. When test scores go down, we do not gnash our teeth and look for villains.
and we know that neither celebrations nor Salem witch trials are called for based on a single standardized test which measures so very little of what a child will need to know to succeed in today’s world (or yesterday’s world or even tomorrow’s world.)
