Dana Milbank?the Washington Post's answer to Maureen Dowd?goes after President Obama for ?bullying teachers, civil rights groups,? and even ?community organizers? by enhancing the authority of standardized testing. Milbank writes that there is ?nothing wrong with testing? but that using scores to evaluate teachers, a policy Obama supports, encourages those teachers to turn their pupils into ?test-taking automatons.? This argument, regardless of its merits, is so old that it's become boring. A rarer argument is this: Tying employment decisions to students' test scores gives students unprecedented power, and a pupil who is not particularly fond of his instructor has no reason to not purposefully fail the high-stakes tests that will be used to judge his teacher's classroom worth. It seems only right that for such tests to have ramifications for educators they must also have ramifications for students, no?
?Liam Julian