From Peter Greene’s CURMUDGUCATION
US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is here with some back-to-school blogging to assure folks that he is listening to somebody…
Duncan says he’s been having many many conversations with teachers, “often led by Teacher and Principal Ambassador Fellows” (those teachy folks who have been carefully vetted and selected by the DOE, so you know they’re a real collection of widely varied viewpoints). And in those conversations, he’s picked a little something something about standardized testing…
No test will ever measure what a student is, or can be. It’s simply one measure of one kind of progress. Yet in too many places, testing itself has become a distraction from the work it is meant to support.
You know what one might conclude from that? One might conclude that the testing is a doing an ever-so-crappy job of supporting “the work it is meant to support.”
States will have the opportunity to request a delay in when test results matter for teacher evaluation during this transition. As we always have, we’ll work with them in a spirit of flexibility to develop a plan that works…
I would like to check with someone from Washington to see what it feels to be flailed with that spirit of flexibility. But Duncan is opening the door to states postponing the most painful consequences of testing for one year, because, you know, teachers’ voices.