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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2006-02-27

Democrats: Friends of Education

The Rocky Mountain News says a mouthful this morning:

Critics of standardized tests in schools will seize any opportunity to weaken the state's accountability system, and their latest ploy is both simple and deceptive. They're backing a proposal to ensure schools aren't penalized on the state "report cards" for having a lot of students skip those key tests.

Essentially, House Bill 1289 would reduce the current testing system to a purely voluntary exercise. What's that worth as a measure of accountability? Practically nothing. . . .

In the "legislative declaration" that introduces the bill, there is a lot of scaremongering rhetoric revealing the anti-testing bias that inspired it. Keep the paragraph that protects students from punishment for missing the tests. Scrap the rest

Of course the Dems were going to work very hard to weaken the accountability measures in the schools--those make it too hard on the teachers' union to protect their jobs. But this effort deviously makes it look like everything is still the same, even making it look like they're just trying to help out the schools with a smallish statistical difficulty.

How long do you suppose it will take until the only kids taking the CSAP are the ones everybody knows are up to grade level? I can tell you this, if I were the principal of a school that was on probation, I would "encourage" a couple kids to stay home. I would be a fool not to, if there was no consequence to that.

Would that be ethical? Of course not. Will it happen, anyway? No doubt.
Posted by: Michael / 2/27/2006 01:49:00 AM

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