The fear tied to testing has gradually moved educators away from having students develop the lifelong skill of questioning the texts (and themselves) and push to answering the static questions on the tests. The act of questioning is a powerful skill indicating thinking, not producing a formulaic answe to produce a score.

The elephant concerns many educators and I appreciate your directness, David. Corporate "support" and "grants" in edu-initiatives are ubiquitous. Whoever the people are that fund a specific teacher evaluation model or the test that is used to determine teacher effectiveness, obviously values or perhaps produces certain types of information and outcomes. It is a question to be raised about policy crafters, test-makers and grant underwriters. Are there ulterior motives? I mentioned in the follow up post below that ASCD is going to run a national webinar on the issues raised here on September 27th. Your point and post will be brought up in the webinar, in particular- your powerful last question.

Ms. Jacobs, We may need to address the elephant in the room concerning corporate takeover of public education. We have "think tanks" funded by said interests, lobbyists by the hundreds in all states, template legislation and rule-making ready to go for all who drink the koolaid, and a testing business that has succeeded in convincing the entire education bureaucracy as well as government bureaucracy that tests measure all that is good and accurate about student learning and without it, we can't measure how well our students are doing and if our teachers are passing muster as educators worth having! Heck, we even "predict" through said instruments the need for remediation of a student that hasn't taken one class at colleges and universities! Talk about getting the cart before the horse! The amount of money devoted to testing and preparing for those tests is astounding! Pure corporate cannibalism at its finest! Yes, we may need to address this elephant in the room and how our entire education system has been hijacked more for profit than real concern relative to America's student achievement. We will always have room for improvement but generally, we simply have asked teachers to teach to standards that didn't contain the rigor or depth of knowledge measured on the NAEP or PISA instruments. Given time, we will see improvement there when the coherence is provided by like standards and expectations nationwide. Your blog about Socrates is another sad commentary of this hijacking where evaluations are used to justify the need for the private sector and their for- profit motives to intervene so they get a slice of the money they have targeted. The elephant is getting bigger and meaner by the day. The question is, can we get it under control and back into its proper environment?

Additionally, Socrates spent far too much time with oratory.  As we now know, teaching students to speak well is not important and not test worthy.  www.pvlegs.com

Excellent post! Best metaphor I've seen so far!

This was also posted on the Curriculum 21 Blog and the Ning. There's even more conversation about this and other Common Core Related issues at http://www.curriculum21.com/