http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/no-child-left-behind/obamas-puzzling-contradictions.htmlYet his education policies to this point cannot ever reach this goal. Nor can they do what he promised during the presidential campaign: Stop high-stakes standardized testing from driving our public education system.
His education secretary, Arne Duncan, has, in his $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition encouraged practices in school districts that were unsuccessful in No Child Left Behind in closing the achievement gap -- including a continued obsession with high-stakes standardized tests.
But equally obscene is the way the Race to the Top has been structured. It is, quite literally, a race, a contest among states to deliver an education reform proposal that Duncan likes.
Contests have winners and losers, but in this case, the losers aren’t adults who couldn’t answer a fifth grade science question correctly. In this competition, the losers are school children in states where the adults either did not know how to play Duncan’s game, or chose not to follow his rules.
FUAD