drjamesarnold.com

    There’s a wolf in the closet.  He’ll stay there until after the elections, but somebody will open the door for him once the votes are in.  Count on it.  Both candidates for Governor of the state of Georgia have expressed an interest in letting this wolf out, and once out he won’t go back in again.  The lure of $59 billion dollars, regardless of the source of those funds and especially in the ethically challenged Georgia system of politics, is just too much for politicians to ignore.  Both candidates might hem and haw and say they would only use the money “with the backing of teachers and the TRS board of directors,” but that’s Georgia politics at its finest.  Tell the voters what you think they want to hear before the election, and forget you ever said it once you’re in office.  If that doesn’t work, blame someone else for following through on what you really wanted in the first place.     The Georgia Chamber of Commerce supports the idea.  They say the move to allow TRS to

The Option Game     Supporters of the accountability movement in public education have had 13 years of test driven “reform” to prove their point.  It should be obvious now that 13 years of accountibalism have produced no positive results. If you believe that test scores accurately reflect teaching and learning in our public schools then you also must accept those scores have not shown a positive effect.  If you believe the SAT is reflective of student achievement then 13 years of test and retest and test again have been an abysmal failure in serving as anything other than a reliable predictor of family income.  In spite of the continued demand for “choice” by the professional accountabullies - those that insist that standardized testing is the only way to hold public education accountable - the only success stories they can point to are the gigantic growth of the educational testing industry and draining millions of tax dollars from public education into privatization efforts.