Joshua Starr is the superintendent of Montgomery County’s public school system, the 17th largest district in the nation. He says that the “country needs a three-year moratorium on standardized testing and needs to ‘stop the insanity’ of evaluating teachers according to student test scores because it is based on ‘bad science.’He also said that the best education reform the country has had is actually health-care reform.”
He said that evaluating teachers by test scores is a very bad idea.
Starr said that “a good way to create assessments for Common Core-aligned curriculum would be to crowd-source the development and let teachers design them rather than have corporations do it. He criticized policies that help make public education ‘a private commodity.'”
Starr said that schools have been asked to make too many changes at the same time.
Joshua Starr was named as a member of the honor roll on September 1, 2012, for refusing to accept Race to the Top funding to judge his teachers by their test scores.
Superintendents across the nation have told me they share Starr’s views. If only they all said so in public, we could reclaim American education from the miasma of bad ideas.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am going to give Mr. Starr my teaching application as recognition of a job well done. My superintendent is too busy “winning” races and Broad prizes to speak out against policies that harm teachers and students.
MCPS rocks and so do the teachers and especially Joshua Starr. MoCo kids get a real education. It’s worth the $2Billion we spend each year.
Thank you Josh! You are a welcome change from our previous Superintendent! Thank you for having the courage to speak out. We have a great Superintendent here – who tweets frequently, along with a great PAR performance and evaluation system. Our students have backgrounds from 155 countries with more than 120 languages spoken at home.
As delighted as I am that Dr. Starr appears to be a refreshing change from his predecessor – as far as I’m concerned, Jerry Weast couldn’t have left fast enough to suit me as a teacher or as a parent – there is still a lot of pressure on teachers in MCPS schools where the rubber meets the road. I have a bright second-grader in tears over her homework load; her classmate’s mom told me that her 2nd-grader has more homework than her 8th-grader, and I partly blame the new CC-ctyle curriculum that’s pushing some kids too far to fast, and slowing down (and boring) the brighter ones in the name of keeping them all together.
Since the schools are being judged so unfairly, why have State Departments of Education not filed suit against those provisions? Why have teachers’ unions not filed suit in defense of teachers being judged “ineffective” over test scores of students they’ve never taught? Dr. Starr has made a courageous statement, but now what? Parents want to fight back, teachers want to fight back, but we’re relatively powerless. It would be nice if the big guys got out the big guns too.
Districts over the whole country need to unite and just stop taking the tests. If they all refused, it would come to an end
This is the truth. Parents, please opt your kids out!
Ever heard of the ALT-MSA? (Doesn’t appear that Josh Starr has). You can’t opt your kids out, because the testing goes on for months. It’s not just one day. The ALT-MSA is the Maryland made-up, baseless, worthless “alternate assessment” for kids with severe disabilities. (and did I mention that it comes from Pearson?) Parents hate it, teachers hate it, and it takes away from valuable classroom time for kids working on skills like….talking. Eating.. Toileting. If I could have opted my kid out, believe me I would have.
It was Jerry Weast who sold the curriculum and sold out the system. The school board (they never said NO to Jerry) caved. In addition, I believe that we, the MoCo taxpayers paid to have this curriculum developed and then it was sold or licensed to Pearson.
In addition, MCPS employees are promoting it and we may not see any royalties until 2014 or later.
One thing I love about living here is that people are spirited, intelligent and active. The above hot- linked blog is excellent in following MCPS.