My Comment Over at Amanda Ripley's

Me:

Amanda,

You’re studying schools systems around the world, so you know that accountability and competition are part of all the successful examples to some degree. You are also quite aware that none of them—NONE—have become successful because of a strategy that sees the goal of the educational endeavor as the production of standarized test scores and statistics regarding graduation, college enrollment, etc.

This reductive view is makes this reform agenda inherently “corporate” and “market driven.” There has to be a bottom line, so the entire goal of education, the entire philosophy is being bent to fit a bottom line mentality.

Note as well however that in 2011 in the USA, many people, including the President, pay a lot of money to escape the “market driven reform” economy entirely. That is, they pay to send their children to schools which are not required to view their children as potential units of instructional output.

We all understand that for our own children—and most teachers come to understand the same for their students—that what we truly value goes far beyond a few test scores. Other successful countries know this. But we cannot have an efficient market without numbers, so we will build a system around those numbers.