My perspective: 41 years of teaching in central Africa, West Africa, Puerto Rico, Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis, Spanish immersion and Montessori in St Paul, etc. I quit because I just couldn't take the standardization and uniformity any more. I loved those kids, especially the harder ones, and I miss them terribly. But I just couldn't participate in that form of child abuse called high-stakes testing. It harms all kids to some degree, but it most harms the very children of color or children of immigrants that it pretends to help.

My judgment is that No Child Left Behind is actually a very insidious initiative designed to destroy public education while it documents that destruction in minute detail. It is part and parcel of the wider goal of decreasing the size of the U.S. middle class and creating a national socio-economic structure more like that of many 3rd World countries (small and very rich at the top, huge and very poor in the bottom, not much in the middle).

On a wide scale, it is lamentable that our country is now destroying the most basic mechanism of class mobility, which the Founders saw as essential to the democracy they imagined. On a personal level, it is tragic that we quash the initiative and individuality of the very brightest individuals in our society. Where before the little geniuses and artists and thinkers sat ignored in the back of the class, reading or sketching or looking out the window, we now test them and prod them and monitor their every movement until any thought which cannot be tested is quite impossible.

Greek mythology tells the story of Theseus, who on his travels encountered a roadside host named Procrustes, known for his perfect bed, which fit all travelers exactly. Theseus, however, discovered that the iron bed fit all because it cut off the legs of those who were too tall and stretched those who were too short. The "guests" died, of course, until Theseus fitted Procrustes to his own bed and killed the monster. It might be an interesting fate for those educational "reformers" who believe that schools will improve if only all children behave identically on tests.

I challenge those who worship the false science of standardized testing to put their practices to a truly scientific evaluation. Set up an experiment with a true control. Match two groups of children by all criteria thought to influence learning outcomes. Give the experimental set all the tests they normally would receive over a 7 year period. Give the control group only an initial standardize test and a legal exemption from all testing over the 7-year period, then finishing with a second standardized test. Then compare the two groups.

My theory is that the control group would actually do better on the standardized test, since they are able to spend more time learning instead of cramming for some meaningless test. When I have suggested this sort of study to various educational researchers, they all agreed that it would be a good research design for determining whether testing was a good approach for creating educational reform. But they also had one question: "Who would fund such a study?"

I love Charley's comment.

This report and discussion makes for an interesting contrast with the piece in today's Star Tribune, in which a Chinese teacher, working in White Bear Lake through an exchange program, praises U.S. schools for their encouragement of creativity.