Good to see an administrator speak out at AJC about Arne's policies.

Education seems to have entered its own Bizarro World with Arne Duncan’s policies and beliefs. President Obama’s appointee to head the U.S. Department of Education, second only to Bill Gates as the most powerful force in US educational policy, believes strongly in the Bizarro theory of educational improvement; whatever research says, do the opposite.

....In the category of “you can’t make this stuff up,” Duncan recently noted the performance of special education students in several states was not meeting his lofty expectations. His solution, again meeting Bizarro requirements, was to raise expectations and subject SPED students to more standardized testing by using National Assessment of Educational Progress as an indicator of their progress.

Even though NAEP was not designed to measure this, Bizarro reasoning says it’s OK because “it’s the best we have.” Parents of students with a learning disability will be happy to know their concerns, fears and worries can be erased with the amazing combination of higher expectations and more testing. Who knew?

...If standardized testing were an effective measure of teacher performance and student academic achievement, why haven’t private schools and post -secondary institutions jumped on the bandwagon so their students would not, so to speak, be left behind. That there is no such groundswell seems to indicate the benefits of standardized testing presented by accountabullies in the name of accountabalism only accrue to public school students.

Isn’t it a shame that the children of those making the rules almost always attend schools exempt from those policies?