Teaching to the Test

Reporter Dana Milbanks writes in the WaPo that Obama's educational policy is taking the worst part of Bush's policy and intensifying it:

...Obama has taken the worst aspect of Bush's No Child Left Behind education law -- an obsession with testing -- and amplified it.

Obama has expanded the importance of standardized testing to determine how much teachers will be paid, which educators will be fired and which schools will be closed -- despite evidence that such practices are harmful. In the process, he's offended just about all the liberals involved in or advocating for education without gaining much support from conservatives.

...Privately, Obama's one-time friends are far more caustic. They talk of an "elitist" and "arrogant" administration embracing an education policy produced by the Center for American Progress with too little regard for what happens in practice.

"The curriculum will be narrowed even more than under George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind," New York University education professor Diane Ravitch, an education official in George H.W. Bush's administration, wrote of Obama's education policy in a piece for the Huffington Post. "There will be even less time available for the arts, science, history, civics, foreign language, even physical education. Teachers will teach to the test. There will be more cheating, more gaming the system." The tests, she said, are "simply not adequate" to separate good teachers and schools from bad.

But try telling all this to the Obama administration. "There's an attitude that if you aren't with us, you are against us -- and therefore against children and reform," a Democratic friend of mine who runs an education advocacy group in Washington told me. The administration, she said, "tries to bully and condemn any opposition, even if it is from groups that should be their allies."