It starts here:
On Saturday President Obama proposed a “Testing Action Plan” (TAP) that urges states to cap student standardized testing at no more than 2 percent of instructional time per year.
Media outlets greeted his proposal as news, forgetting, perhaps, that the White House actually proposed the same plan this past summer, as did the Council of Chief State School Officers, the group that developed the Common Core State Standards.
But redundancy isn’t the point. Instead, the president has successfully undermined a set of dynamics that have produced the opt-out movement, which draws its constituency from teacher unions, suburban parents, and local-control adherents. The proof is in anti-testers’ uniformly negative reaction to sensible constraints on the impact of assessments on instructional time.
Read the rest here.
