Payman Rouhanifard was in charge of Joel Klein’s “Office of Portfolio Management” in New York City. He was appointed as superintendent of schools in Camden, New Jersey, by Chris Christie. He arrived in Camden as a “devout believer” in testing, data-based decision making, and accountability. Before he stepped down last June he had a change of mind. He began to see that the schools had turned testing into both means and end, and that testing had crowded out the arts, science, foreign languages, and Global Studies. His reflections are fascinating, as he shows the capacity to examine his beliefs and change them.

Here is the speech he delivered at MIT a few weeks ago.

I urge you to read it.

He is a reformed reformer. I question his view that we need to have standardized tests for chemistry, physics, and the arts. He thinks that may be the only way to balance the curriculum and restore what has been sacrificed to the gods of testing, but I don’t agree.

There is much good sense here. I admire anyone who is willing to do the hard work of rethinking their views. It is not easy. Unlike me, he doesn’t seem to have alienated his friends in the Reform movement. Many of them are also beginning to be disenchanted with standardized testing.

I certainly applaud his conclusion that any reform should be gauged by the measure of “would I do this to my own children?”