NCLB “lying to children and parents” – U.S. Ed Sec Duncan, Sept. 24, 2009

According to an Ed Dept press release:
In his speech, Duncan said that the NCLB law has significant flaws and that he looks forward to working with Congress to address the law’s problems. He said the law puts too much emphasis on standardized tests, unfairly labels many schools as failures, and doesn’t account for students’ academic [...]

Kevin Welner “Obama’s Dalliance with Truthiness” (limited time public access)

“During his campaign, Barack Obama was adept at identifying the Bush administration’s failures to use research responsibly. He assured us that he would not misspend taxpayer dollars on projects that were ideologically appealing but unsupported by facts. No more would policy be based on imaginary or invented evidence at odds with the best knowledge available.

“But those who believed in this promise are now confronted with policy edicts from the Department of Education that are as ill-grounded, dogmatic, and heavy-handed as any that emerged from the prior administration. These edicts are tied to the Department’s “Race to the Top,” a $4.35 billion program that is part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus spending.”

Obama team’s support for portfolio assessment

Thanks to Checker Finn’s shop (where they’re not wild about this), we have this news:
Tuesday morning on the Diane Rehm Show … Obama staffer Melody Barnes expressed her candidate’s openness to using portfolios to assess student achievement under No Child Left Behind .
I don’t have time to blog more now ( I’m turning around my pre-service [...]