Great ideas still not coming from Washington

Arne Duncan gave a speech at the National Press Club last May, wherein he said: "You know, when I was in Chicago, I didn’t think all the good ideas came from Washington. Now that I’m in Washington, I know all the good ideas don’t come from Washington. The good ideas are always going to come from great educators in local communities."

I guess that explains why his ideas for ESEA re-authorization, outlined in the Obama administration's 2011 budget proposal, are a federal bureaucrat's wishlist: national standardized tests, cradle-to-career child surveillance systems, and a big pot of discretionary dollars for the US Secretary of Education to dole out to states that do his bidding. 

Given the sea of red ink we are embarking upon, I think the notion that Congress will give Arne another big pot of playmoney is fantasy -- even if his ideas for reform had some currency outside the small gang of thugs driving the deformation of American education, which they don't.  No Republican is going to risk his seat to support such federalization of education policy, however attractive its union-bashing elements might be.

Arne wants to replace NCLB accountability with national standardized tests that measure growth toward "College and Career Readiness."  It's a brilliantly stupid idea that will eventually lead to the complete discreditation of the test-driven accountability train.  Any national testing regime is going to invite widespread scrutiny, and under such scrutiny it will collapse.  The reason why it will collapse is quite simple: as is well-known among psychometricians, year-to-year changes in student test scores are almost completely random.  Aggregating these bits of randomness to the class or school level mostly results in more randomness.  This is what New York City does for it school progress reports, and, because the results are meaningless junk, why nobody believes them any more.  (As an indication of how bad they are, New York City Department of Education ignored its own reports in making its recent school closing decisions.)

It's evident that there is going to be no real national dialogue on the issue.  Duncan has resolutely ignored the eminently sensible alternatives proposed by the Broader, Bolder Agenda -- even though  he two-facedly signed onto it.  So I say, let the test-o-maniacs have their way.  A national testing regime couldn't possibly be worse than all the ridiculous state tests we have now,  and, sad to say, an accoutability metric that produces meaningless junk would actually be an improvement -- because what we have now produces toxic junk.  Argument is not going to sway these obsessed clowns who have never spent a day in the classroom as a teacher, but think they know best.  Let them have their way and fall on their faces.  The sooner we let them demonstrably fail, the sooner we might move onto something that makes sense.