All of this crap is just that... crap. "Teaching for the test/compliance" is the big whine today. 15 years ago, the trend was to give everyone an A so their feelings wouldn't be hurt.
Teachers are all bent because kids aren't doing well on standardized tests, so they get pressure to raise the grades. So they address the situation by drilling the kids to pass the test, and it's obvious that the dumb kids are still dumb and the smart kids are still smart.
You have all of these people making big money analyzing these states to death and coming up with lots of brilliant ideas. At the end of the day, it means nothing because some percentage of kids do well, some percentage are drinking in the boy's room and some people in the middle are penalized/rewarded by some variance introduced by the system.
Teachers are all bent because kids aren't doing well on standardized tests, so they get pressure to raise the grades. So they address the situation by drilling the kids to pass the test, and it's obvious that the dumb kids are still dumb and the smart kids are still smart.
You have all of these people making big money analyzing these states to death and coming up with lots of brilliant ideas. At the end of the day, it means nothing because some percentage of kids do well, some percentage are drinking in the boy's room and some people in the middle are penalized/rewarded by some variance introduced by the system.