Yesterday, Barack Obama said that "those of us who manage the public's dollars will...do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between and people and their government." So maybe he'd like a great new proposal from the Oklahoma Business & Education Coalition, floated last week: to create an independent agency to manage the state's testing and accountability program. This makes a ton of sense, and not just in Oklahoma, because right now these functions are buried within departments of education, where they can be subject to political manipulation, particularly in states where the agencies are run by elected officials or gubernatorial appointees. Would anyone trust results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress if it was managed directly by the U.S. Department of Education? Still, not surprisingly, Oklahoma's (elected) state superintendent, Sandy Garrett, dismissed the idea as merely adding "more bureaucracy." Which brings to mind another Obama quote from yesterday: "What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long, no longer apply."
