FYI… I started my new job today after being unemployed for six months (but fortunately with five months of severance pay). The time off from my work gave me the opportunity to really plunge into my writing and finally, after many false starts over the past 15 years, really get into a writing groove. So with my new job I have much less of my own time but I hope not to abandon my “groove” completely. So some of these upcoming posts may be shorter and not as well developed. Others will be pieces I’ve written previously. So here goes…

Please someone tell me what “strong assessments” and “rigorous standards” mean to Arne Duncan! And please don’t tell me it is built around multiple-choice standardized tests. These types of tests may be able to judge the knowledge acquisition of someone training to sell real estate, or be a contractor, but as the main means to judge if a kid is moving forward in their development?

We have a history of depending on multiple-choice intelligence tests to judge people’s IQs. That led to a fiasco in the 1920s of labeling Jews and southern European immigrants as mental defectives, and based on that passing the first immigration legislation barring them from entry to the United States. Relying on one multiple-choice IQ test as a total means of assessment was later debunked by the consensus of psychologists and social scientists.

The “Nation at Risk” report in the 1980s sounding an alarm about the education level of American youth versus other industrialized countries, followed by the Clinton Administration “Goals 2000” and the Bush II administration “No Child Left Behind” to address that “gap”. But the main metric for assessing student achievement are again multiple-choice standardized tests.

Have we forgotten our history? And particularly the sad chapter of IQ test pseudo-science that lead to errantly labeling huge numbers of non-wasp and non-white people as “mentally defective”?

Again, a multiple-choice test may be an effective way to assess a person’s acquisition of a specific technical set of knowledge, including real estate agents and brokers, contractors, licensed therapists, etc. But assessing a young person’s overall educational development based on a couple multiple-choice tests is completely inappropriate in my opinion.

So just those few thoughts for now. Not time at the moment to develop this further but I think there is the kernal of an important argument here.