Believe it or not,

I agree with the NEA on something. If you watch school politics much, you'll see teachers complaining that standardized testing takes away too much valuable classroom time. Now, I might doubt how valuable classroom time is for kids in many schools, but certainly most standardized tests use an amazing amount of time--really up to a week. The NEA has a legitimate point here.

Does it really take this much time to verify one's ability to read, write, and cipher? Well, no; my children were evaluated using a "Peabody" evaluation in less than two hours apiece. This kind of test is a standard evaluation used when it's impractical to use longer evaluations, and it correlates very well to them.

Which ought to be expected; again, how long does it really take to verify that a child is reading at grade level? You hand him a book and set him at it, right? And then you place some arithmetic before him and have him do it, right? And you'd be done in a few hours at most, not a few days, right?

We have here a bitter irony. The industrial (see Gatto) mindset that pervades the school system gave us a one size fits all mindset in the name of "efficiency," and it turns out that the tests necessary to administer this "efficient" system take ten times longer to take than the "inefficient" method of putting a book before a child and asking him to read.

So kudos to the NEA for getting this one right. Maybe someday they'll realize that the inefficiency of "administratium" is a necessary result of applying their factory model to education.

Accuse me of dreaming. It's fair.