Gyroscopic Investing

For another, he can’t quite get over the fact that it is Democrats who have been pushing to retain some of the controversial testing mandates in No Child Left Behind, which was President George W. Bush’s key education initiative.  He wrote about a pro-testing amendment:

Almost every Democrat in the US Senate just voted to keep Test and Punish.

But Republicans defeated them.

I know. I feel like I just entered a parallel universe, too. But that’s what happened.

[...]

In 2012, the Obama administration began to issue waivers to states from the most onerous parts of NCLB — such as the impossible requirement that virtually all students score proficient in math and reading by 2014 — but only to states that agreed to implement reforms approved by the Education Department. Among those reforms is a requirement that teachers be evaluated in part by student standardized test scores, a method that assessment experts have warned against using for such high-stakes purposes.

[...]

The administration has for six years pushed high-stakes standardized testing as a central education priority and has continued to defend it in the face of a burgeoning national anti-testing movement that includes teachers, parents, principals, superintendents, students and other advocates.

[...]

Both Senate and House bills, which will now go to a conference committee, strip power from the federal government over what to do with schools deemed to be failing. Does that mean the states will make any better decisions than Duncan’s Education Department has since 2009? No, but the Obama administration’s overemphasis on standardized testing and the use of student test scores to hold teachers “accountable” has been so damaging that it was inevitable that a Republican-led Congress would return power to the states.