20-fold increase in standardized testing coming with Gates Foundation's "Common Core":

[maggiesfarmer]

8. I like the the work the Gates foundation is doing

Side tangent: how can you not appreciate the world's richest man when he decides to take 1/2 his money and put it in a charitable foundation to solve the world's toughest problems? He then convinced the world's second richest man to do the same.

Back to the topic: Recall that one of the primary conclusions of the GF's research on education is that the top correlating factor to student performance is teacher performance (i.e. the quality of the teacher is more impactful that class size, teacher:student ratio, quality of the books, teacher certification, school schedule, etc..). Good teachers can effectively teach, and the number of students in their class doesn't appear to be a strong limiting factor in a good teacher's ability to communicate. Bad teachers can't teach, and reducing their class size to near 1:1 ratios and providing them the best books and teaching supplements still doesn't make them effective teachers.

GF education research

Standardized tests, implemented on an annual basis, allow a quantitative means of evaluating the progress of a given student, thus providing a quantitative means of evaluating the teacher:
-compare each student's test performance this year to last year
-compare teacher A and B within the same school
-if all of teacher A's students improved by 20% this year over last year, and all of teacher B's improved by only 10%, it's a fair conclusion that teacher A is doing a better job than B
-recall, the goal is not to compare how Johnny is doing to Billy; the goal is not to compare how school system X in the DC suburbs compares to school system Y in the Appalachian backwoods

I don't think standardized tests are the ideal method for evaluating teachers and wouldn't advocate using them as the sole litmus test, but they do provide some indication and I haven't heard anyone offer better suggestions. Ideally, we would have a way to correlate a high school graduates career contribution to society and the work force back to their K-12 teachers, but that seems like a stretch goal at this point is history and technology.

As someone who supports the role of the teacher, I applaud this research and the conclusions. I hope this leads to policy shifts where we see teacher salaries increasing to the point where education, as a career choice, once again attracts the best and brightest minds into the field. The path to becoming qualified to teaching K-12 has become a joke: education majors have the lowest (or nearly) among college attendees, certification tests to be licensed as a K-12 teacher require no more than a college-bound high school education to pass and education degrees are considered the easiest to graduate with.

If more standardized testing gives us the data we need to convince the public that major change in our education system is needed, I fully support it. (FTR: the issue of how to create a "good" standardized test I have no opinion on.) If someone sees another path to evaluate teacher and student performance, I'm very open-minded to listen and read.