The 74 Million – Matt Barnum
“Everyone, for once, seemed to agree. D.C. politicians, state superintendents, teachers — all said that No Child Left Behind placed too much emphasis on big, bad standardized tests. State assessments, critics complained, could be be gamed: taught to or cheated on. The tests weren’t complete measures of student learning, many complained, and they incentivized schools to focus narrowly on reading and math, at the expense of other subjects. Proficiency measures of performance might cause teachers to pay less attention to students far above or way below that bar. Now critics, at least to some extent, have gotten their wish. A new accountability system under the Every Student Succeeds Act, the federal K-12 education law that replaced No Child Left Behind, allows states to use measures other than test scores to judge schools, though academic measures, including test scores, still need to carry more weight.”(more)