In 1983, the U.S. Department of Education issued a report titled “A Nation at Risk” because of a “rising tide of mediocrity” infecting the nation’s schools, kicking off what has now become almost 35 years of education “reform.” The Reagan administration opened the door to charter schools. If public schools were failing, Reagan argued, it was an injustice to prevent parents from moving their children into better schools.

But it also launched what I now think of as a mania for measuring the performance of schools and students, all in the name of accountability: It all boiled down to how schools and students perform on standardized tests. No Child Left Behind under George W. Bush and then Race to the Top during the Obama years only increased the mania.

The implosion of the attempted imposition of the Common Core State Standards and the selection of Betsy DeVos as education secretary have chastened at least the center-left reformers who once populated the Obama White House. Arne Duncan and Betsy DeVos are at a roughly 80 percent overlap in their views on education, but that last 20 percent appears to be a bridge too far.

Read the full article by John Warner about standardized testing from Chicago Tribune