Among that provision’s most tenacious critics has been Robert Linn, a University of Colorado professor emeritus who is one of the nation’s foremost testing experts. He argued, almost from the law’s passage, that no society anywhere has brought 100 percent of students to proficiency, and that the annual gains required to meet the goal of universal proficiency were unrealistically rapid, since even great school systems rarely sustain annual increases in the proportion of students demonstrating proficiency topping three to four percentage points.
“If, no matter how hard teachers work, the school is labeled as a failure, that’s just demoralizing,” Dr. Linn said.
The article notes that good schools are being declared failures. Unfortunately, Barack Obama and John McCain and those who have moderated the first two presidential debates have totally written off education as an issue in this year's election.
It's surprising (not) that a university professor should say that it's not good to judge a student or a school or a district on the merits because someone's feelings may get hurt.
ReplyDeleteIt's also interesting that he thinks schools can't get all students up to some basic level of proficiency over a period of years. I bet there were a lot of people who said "impossible" when our country first decided to send a man to the moon too.