Paul Krugman:

Some people seem to think that I’m saying that racism and the other issues I classify as “weapons of mass distraction” are what movement conservatism is about. They aren’t.

What the movement is about is economics: the core goal is, as Heritage says in its fundraising letters, to roll back the New Deal and the Great Society — or as Grover Norquist puts it, to get things back to the way they were “up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over.”

Race and other distractions aren’t the goal, they’re a tactic — they’re how an anti-populist movement wins elections.

I think we can add standardized education reform to the list, also. Oh, and let’s not forget performance pay, which Eduwonkette points out is not generally awarded to workers in the private sector based on client outcomes.

It seemed to me from the beginning of this testing juggernaut that the most certain outcome of using standardized test scores to evaluate schools, teachers, and students would be to set up a grand finger-pointing drama in which everyone claims to be the victim of someone else’s bad faith. I hate to say it, but…there we go.

And even this shall one day pass. But I wonder what might be left of faith in anything by then.

For whatever it may have been worth, I sent George Miller a message, and received a response. I suggested that it would be a better idea to:

  • emphasize class size reduction,
  • provide resources for quality teacher training,
  • provide mentors for new teachers,
  • provide teachers in adequate numbers to meet the needs of learning disabled and ELL students,
  • and provide for programs that promote parental and family involvement in our schools.

His response was discouraging, though, because he has the idea that accountability using multiple measures means more tests:

For elementary schools, these “multiple indicators” include increases in the percentages of students who move from below basic to basic levels of proficiency and improvements in state science, writing, history, social studies, or civics tests.

No, no, no, no, no.

Oh, and in case anyone thinks that I object to testing because it narrows the curriculum, I don’t. I object to the curriculum itself. Testing just makes it worse.