There’s a particular frustration I feel when I read this sort of discussion. In an interview with Noam Chomsky I once listened to, I recall him saying something along the lines of, “There’s no point in telling truth to power. They already know the truth, and they don’t care. They’re not the people you need to talk to.”
I think that there are two real goals in education reform: crushing any potential resistance from working class students (which is to say, most students in public schools, and a lot in charter and private schools), and crushing any potential resistance from teachers. The latter is significant and I think too often overlooked: teachers are a large body of educated, unionized workers, in relatively good communication with each other.
So I think it’s worth noticing how much of the absurdity of testing and educational metrics is aimed at discrediting teachers, who are blamed for failing to achieve impossible goals with useless tools.
