If we know that ingenious innovations require an extensive incubation period where ideas can become bigger than the sum of their parts, then we have to know that attributing the success of a child's learning at the end of the year exclusively to their latest teacher is a step beyond asinine.
Designing and implementing elaborate accountability schemes that reward and punish teachers and students alike based on one-time, high stake tests provides at best a superficial and supremely shallow window into the engines of creativity that exist in our schools.
Senator Paul Wellstone may have summed this up best:
Making students accountable for test scores works well on a bumper sticker and it allows many politicians to look good by saying that they will not tolerate failure. But it represents a hollow promise. Far from improving education, high- stakes testing marks a major retreat from fairness, from accuracy, from quality, and from equity.
