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James,
I don't have an entrenched position on any of this. But I think the 
culture of fear revealed by the Atlanta report is a serious 
indictment of the ways testing can be misused. As for Brooks, it's 
not clear to me that single school successes are an indication of 
anything except blips of enthusiasm. How do we know these schools 
haven't assembled an unusually motivated set of teachers and 
administrators?  Wouldn't most experimental schools have a good 
amount of that? How do you deliver [whatever made them successful] to 
entire school districts, entire states?

If the answer were obvious, I think we would have solved the 
education problem a long time ago. There's been no shortage of 
funding for new approaches in education. But how do you deliver the 
successes reaped from these programs to ordinary schools where (often 
undereducated) teachers are daily chastised and humiliated (made to 
crawl under tables) if they don't succeed where others have failed?

I totally agree that this is a systems problem; not one problem but 
many. Tests aren't bad in themselves. It's how the results are used 
that can be useful or destructive and, as in an ecological setting, 
context, scale and timing are everything.

Jennie Dusheck
Science Writing & Editing
Santa Cruz, Ca



At 5:12 AM -0700 7/7/11, James Bell wrote:
>Thanks for the dialogue, Eric. This is the part of the message that 
>I think we need to keep in mind:
>
>"...look at which schools are most distorted by testing. As the 
>education blogger Whitney Tilson has pointed out, the schools that 
>best represent the reform movement, like the KIPP academies or the 
>Harlem Success schools, put tremendous emphasis on testing. But 
>these schools are also the places where students are most likely to 
>participate in chess and dance. They are the places where they are 
>most likely to read Shakespeare and argue about philosophy and 
>physics. In these places, tests are not the end. They are a lever to 
>begin the process of change."
>
>And as you (and Brooks) point out tests are one way of measuring 
>change, and only part of a much larger ecology.

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