Tom Pauken has written a fascinating and informative article about how Texas became the leader of the testing movement and how testing became an instrument to destroy local control.
Pauken is a prominent Republican. He just concluded a term on the Texas Workforce Commission.
He became an outspoken opponent of the testing regime, as he saw that it was bad for students and bad for the workforce.
The only beneficiary of the testing obsession seems to be the testing company Pearson, which won a contract from the Texas legislature for nearly $500 million at the same time that the legislators were cutting $5.4 billion from the schools.
It is heartening that some wise heads in the Texas Republican party are beginning to push back against high-stakes testing because Republicans control the state.
Pauken is still in a minority but he has an important voice. He is a former chairman of the state party.
His fellow Republicans should listen to him and stop the high-stakes testing that has produced so few gains in the past twenty years and done so much to undermine education quality.
Doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get different results makes no sense.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I admire the bravery and character of anyone who is a leader in that state! They must have such traits to stand up to the Bush Cabal that is deeply entrenched in all these nefarious charades guised under their pseudo loving educational reformers! Much like calling poison a health aid, they go about their corporate duties to promote “isms”; NCLB, RTTT, knowing all the while that their greedy corporate masters have no interest in advancing education,but GREAT interest in turning public education into prey to their money mania! Just today in the NYT’s editorial they quoted from the TEXAS, GOP plank for 2012, and I quote:…”The Texas GOP explicitly condemned the teaching of “Critical thinking skills” because it said such efforts, “Have the purpose of challenging the students’ fixed beliefs, and undermining parental authority.” OMG! Sounds like an excerpt from “1984!” If anything, it amazingly shows the utter contempt the GOP has for intellectual pursuits in that very radical (“Let’s succeed from the Union”) state. Pauken has a Herculean task ahead!
Thank you for posting Mr. Pauken’s article. His suggestions are gaining an ear in the legislature, and we teachers thank him for bravely exposing the testing monster created in the bowels of Texas. Maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but I believe the reign of terror just might be nearing its end. See you in Texas in a couple of weeks!
“Doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get different results makes no sense.” I do believe that’s a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein. However, the ones that believe it works are definitely not geniuses!
Texas must have some kind of weird drug in the water to create what is going on there. Pearson, they just want the money and profits. They are easy to understand.
20 years of tests prove what we knew before we administered one of them: kids raised in poverty do poorer on standardized tests linked to age-based grade levels than kids raised in affluence. How many different tests do we need to administer before we reach the conclusion that reducing poverty is the answer to improving our schools?