Bertis Downs is a great supporter of public education who lives in Athens, Georgia, and sends his daughter to Clarke Central High School. He is also a valued director of the Network for Public Education.

In this post, he thanks President Obama for recognizing the great things happening in his local high school. But he invites the President to visit Athens and see what his policies are doing to the school.

He writes:

“The policies currently promoted by your Department of Education are actually hurting– not helping– schools like ours. It is clear we will reduce schools’ efficacy if public education remains fixated on tests that only measure limited concepts – tests that regularly relegate less advantaged children into the “bottom half” and limit their access to broader education.

“Why does the law distill the interactions of our teachers and students over the course of a year into a high-stakes multiple choice test? Is this really a valid system of accountability for teachers, based so heavily on their students’ test scores? If so, why are so many public school parents, teachers and students pushing back against it? And why aren’t the private schools insisting on it?

“In my daughter’s English class at Clarke Central, students engage the works of Plato and learn to discern and make philosophical arguments about abstract concepts like piety; they read Hemingway and learn how to engage questions such as whether a protagonist’s moral code can be attributed to the author. You cannot pick “A, B, C, or D” for such things, or if you can, then the entire experience is trivialized. Of course assessments are a necessary part of any educational process, to help guide, inform and improve instruction, but the high-stakes test-and-punish regime now in place is not doing that.

“Choices” like “prep academies” on the public dime make a diverse population like Clarke Central’s increasingly rare, and the No Excuses model schools serve poor and minority populations almost exclusively. Since we know that concentrated poverty so often correlates with low standardized test scores, why is such over-testing and misuse of testing so central to current policy focus? Is that where your education policy is taking us–toward a de facto two-track system with schools for well-to-do students and other schools for those from poverty? Your speeches do not suggest any of this, especially when you talk about “opportunity for all,” ”great teachers,” and “setting high standards.” But current policies, accompanied by the sweet-sounding elixir of “choice,” are reducing the ability of skilled and effective teachers to really teach. Surely you must recognize that privatized models of competition conflict with American education’s historic commitment to empower each child to reach his or her highest potential, a commitment based on educators working together in collaboration as a team.”