I’ll add that it’s also because teachers have long been woefully underpaid, and schools woefully underfunded, and classrooms woefully overcrowded.
If challenged, test fans often quote the late Dr. W. Edward Deming, the world-famous quality guru who showed Japanese companies how to build better stuff than anybody else. In his book, “The New Economics,” Deming wrote, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
Here’s the whole sentence as he wrote it: “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it — a costly myth.”
Reminds me of how the context was similarly stripped from Elizabeth Warren’s quote, “You didn’t build that.”
