Columnist decries high-stakes testing

"It's time to rein in the test zealots who have gotten such a stranglehold on the public schools in the U.S.," writes Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert in the October 9 edition of The New York Times. He quotes Daniel Koretz of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, who recently said, "We've now had four or five different waves of educational reform that were based on the idea that if we can just get a good test in place and beat people up to raise scores, kids will learn more. That's really what No Child Left Behind is."

Herbert's column notes that many schools and states may be tempted to take shortcuts in attempts to ensure that test scores rise. He also quotes a new study released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association as saying that "improvements in passing rates on state tests can largely be explained by declines in the difficulty of these tests."

For further information, read the full article.