No Loophole Left Behind

Campus Report ^ | October 9, 2008 | Bethany Stotts

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No Loophole Left Behind

by: Bethany Stotts, October 09, 2008

Just as the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act was passed under bipartisan leadership, so too criticisms of its flawed structure span the gambit of political persuasions. As previously documented, opposition to the NCLB provisions on annual yearly progress (AYP) and school sanctions have raised significant ire from some conservative policy analysts such as Michael J. Petrilli and CATO’s Neal McClusky, as well as representatives from the progressive National Education Association (NEA).

Daniel Koretz, Harvard Professor of Education and author of Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, recently explained why he believes standards-based testing can yield “bogus” and “absolutely worthless” scores which provide little practical value to society.

“We send kids to school so that they will acquire skills and knowledge that they can use in the workplace and in later education; we don’t send them there to score well on tests,” he argued at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) this September. “So if you prepare kids for tests in a way that give them skills that generalize to the real-world context, then you’re doing the right thing and test-based accountability is working as it should be.”

“When somebody here hires kids out of school, they don’t really care whether they came from Maryland or Virginia, and they’re not gonna ask ‘did you do okay on the Maryland test but not the Virginia test,’ they want to know if they know math.”....