Suggest a shift away from our current mainframe/state secret model to focusing testing on helping individual kids.

Now, we test, and then sometime in the next school year, The State informs schools of results.

What we should be doing is letting teachers, parents, and administrators know the day after testing where there is a problem.

Our current testing regime focuses on grading schools, and gives us information that can only be practically applied in the second year after we get test results. And in most states, the implementation of NCLB's 100% proficiency mandate tells you more about where any given school started out in 2002 than about how things have changed since four years ago.

For most schools, it would be easier to predict whether they failed to make "adequate progress" by looking at their 2002 baseline scores than by looking at changes in their scores since 2002. Why do we have tests that make the data a state secret for months after testing when it is just telling us something we already knew in 2002?

Batch processing mainframes are out, and interactive desktop computers are in. Someone should inform the testing bureaucracy about this change.

"What's the point" indeed! My impression of this blog is that the AFT is only willing to dance around the edges of NCLB. It reminds me a lot of where we were with Iraq a year ago. Everyone was afraid to be critical of the Bush policy because they didn't wanted to be branded with the "cut and run" label, even though they knew the policy was ill-conceived and getting worse by the day. I predict we'll look back on these days in a similar way--as a time when it was becoming obvious that NCLB was a mistake but no one was willing to say it for fear of how the other side would use it against them.