Robert Shepherd, experienced designer of textbooks and assessments, wrote the following:

“I believe in my heart of hearts that there are good, well-meaning people on both sides of the accountability debate. I also believe that there are certainly roles to be played by standards and evaluation systems and testing.

“I fervently hope that we shall see, over the coming years, prudence, vigorous but respectful debate, more caution than has been shown to date with regard to new implementations, and real innovation, INCLUDING competing, vastly differing models for what school looks like. It’s complete hubris for ANY OF US to think that he or she has THE solution.

“Consider, for example, online learning. On the one hand, it can be a godsend, allowing for immediate feedback, embedded formative assessment, and tailoring of education to particular students’ particular needs and propensities. On the other hand, it can mean warehouses of students doing what are basically worksheets on a screen with little interaction with teachers who might serve them as models of what a learner is. One can point to examples of really, really dreadful computer-assisted instruction and to really, really superb examples. And in everything related to these debates–with regard to standards, to high-stakes testing, to teacher evaluation systems, the same can be said: some of what is being done is wonderful. Some of it is really awful.

“I doubt that anyone, except, perhaps, a few test prep publishers, really wants kids to be spending a third of the school year doing test prep drills. I doubt that anyone thinks that that is what his or her reform efforts sometimes amount to, and I think that a lot of folks would be horrified to find that that’s often the case. And it’s because I believe that most people involved, on both sides of the accountability and reform issue, are well-meaning, that I have hope that the egregious excesses we’ve seen from the reform movement can be addressed and that we can all find common ground on which we can have real dialog.

“My personal position is that where there is competition between models, innovation occurs, and so I don’t like blanket prescriptions and blanket, top-down mandates from the left or the right.

“I have followed Diane Ravitch’s work for many years now. I still think that her Left Back is the single best book ever written on American education. And I’ve known her, over the years, to be a stalwart defender of a rigorous, rich, broad-based curriculum in literature, the arts, history, and the sciences. And I have great respect for her as a scholar, someone who doesn’t believe in simple, magic solutions where there are complex underlying determinative phenomena that those solutions don’t address. I am grateful for her voice. We all should be. Vigorous, sometimes messy debate is the hallmark of a pluralistic democracy. I believe in standards. I believe in frequent testing that is NOT high stakes. But I’m not a supporter of mandatory standards, and I think that there are major problems with the CCSS in language arts. That said, I hasten to add that I like many of Mr. Coleman’s underlying ideas–his focus on what texts say rather than on isolated instruction in skills, his emphasis on having kids read related texts over extended periods. These are VERY IMPORTANT, VERY VALUABLE ideas. But I think that implementing those ideas is incompatible with turning our schools into test prep factories.

“We need a lot less debate (and name calling) and a lot more discussion. We need a lot less precipitous prescription and a lot more cautious experiment.”