NO CHILD GETS AHEAD.

The dean at Anonymous Community goes to parents' night.

There was too much to get through.

His teacher repeatedly mentioned the statewide standardized test to which she has to teach. It’s our state’s manifestation of No Child Left Behind, and it leaves relatively little time to linger over misunderstandings. Let me make one change, and this would be it. (Air conditioning would be a close second.) As an old professor of mine used to say, there’s a choice to be made in teaching: you can cover, or you can uncover. Uncovering takes time, and requires patience, but it can lead to actual understanding. Getting through the topics on the exam requires covering. Do too much of that, though, and the kids get bored and tune out.

It looks like the burden to fill in the gaps will fall largely on the parents. We’ll do what we can with TB -- luckily for us, he’s a smart kid -- but I worry about the kids whose parents aren’t as focused on education. If school is all they get, and school is designed around a multiple-choice test, they really aren’t getting much at all.

That's a variation on getting passengers on the train, rather than keeping the train on schedule.  Teaching to the test isn't unreasonable per se, but if the test concepts have little permanent value ...

High stakes testing, rejiggered to the performance norms of the community, might be a Republican plot to keep the poor poor, or it might be a poison pill that gives the education establishment exactly what it wants. Here's Herbert London.

Is the U.S. preoccupation with closing achievement gaps and “leaving no child behind” coming at the expense of our “talented tenth”?

Although this study was done at the elementary school level, it has a direct bearing on higher education. So focused are academics on an egalitarian ethos that distinctions, once critical in the Academy, have virtually disappeared. With grade inflation endemic, the honor roll is little more than a roster of enrolled students. Even Phi Beta Kappa status has been vitiated by undifferentiated grading.

To suggest that there is a talented tenth that deserves special treatment would be regarded as a form of “elitism”, a pejorative widely used on campus.

It is hardly surprising that the U.S. does so poorly on international tests. What we have encouraged at every stage of formal education is compression at the mean. That translates in a modest improvement at the bottom quartile and neglect at the upper quartile. Excellence is simply seen as less important than access.

That this condition may have an influence on national competitiveness is one of those factors better left unstated. This is an America where everyone is believed to be above average, even though the net result of our education systems is mediocrity.

All have won, and all must be given prizes. That all prizes turn out to be booby prizes ...