Rebecca Mead of The New Yorker here assesses President Obama’s seeming change of heart about standardized testing.
She welcomes the fact that he recognizes the administration’s role in promoting the current obsession with testing. But she also notes that the President’s body language suggests that he is not entirely supportive of his script. Is it because he knows that standardized testing has not been a lever for better education?
She notes that the administration’s proposed cap of 2% on time for testing is not in fact a reduction of time for most students and may actually be an increase.
I am very happy to see Rebecca Mead writing about these issues in the New Yorker. Most of its readers probably do not follow what is happening in education as closely as readers of this blog.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I might add that most of its readers to this day recall the hatchet job Steven Brill performed on the NYC Public School teachers in Temporary Reassignment Centers. They were depicted as a waste of resources rather than the true canaries in the mine role many of them were performing as the “reformers” were taking the public school system down.
It doesn’t matter whether or not POTUS believes what he said. Only he knows. However, the window of opportunity opens slightly to diminish and eventually eliminate the test only if we present a viable alternative. If we continue to sit on our hands, we will perish.
Seems to me like he’s simply trying to buy time.
I always wondered if they started from a place where they were convinced public schools were SO bad that they couldn’t imagine anything they did would make them worse.
That’s the sense I always get- that they didn’t assign any value to what exists now so any experiment, any program, any policy, was considered worth throwing out there. There was no risk assessment, no consideration of trade-offs, because in their view there was nothing of value to lose in the system they inherited. It’s the only way the approach makes sense to me, because I consider it reckless to insist that there are ONLY possible upsides, no possible downsides and that is what they insist. Nothing works like that. Experiments involve risk and in such a complex, fragmented system they have no earthly idea how some of this stuff will shake out.
There are clear indications that the so-called reformers are losing control of the narrative, and that the generation-long refusal of the press to do its job and investigate the (totally false) claims of so-called reform is ending, and starting to be replaced by skepticism and real reporting. This week’s excellent investigative report in the New York Times about the machinations of Evil Moskowitz’s behaviorist sweatshop for the Worthy Poor (at least until her twenty-something Principals-In-Diapers decide they’re no longer worthy), along with articles like this in the New Yorker, suggest that perhaps the Big Lie has a finite shelf life.
“And so castles made of sand, slip into the sea, eventually.”
“…skeptics charge that a technocratic faith in accumulating data undermines real learning and misrepresents students’ and teachers’ abilities.” I love the New Yorker. The above statement by Mead is, just for example, far superior to the mainstream media characterizing us as leftist union sympathizers. I wonder if Bill Gates or Eli Broad read the New Yorker. Probably not. It’s over their heads.