Education and civil rights.

• Author: Greene, Peter
• Position: PUBLIC SCHOOL SHAKEDOWN - Brief article

Kati Haycock is president and founder of the Education Trust, a Gates-funded, test-pushing advocacy group that supported No Child Left Behind and helped craft the Common Core. She took to her website to attack the president of the largest teachers' union in the country, NEA's Lily Eskelsen Garcia, for opposing test-and-punish policies.

As the reformsters have found a strong tactical advantage in using the civil rights argument to promote test and punish, let me see if I can distill their important points here:

Argument one: The systemic ignoring, underserving, and general neglect of nonwhite, nonwealthy populations is a real problem. "Do nothing" and "Go back to doing what we used to do" are not viable solutions.

However, test scores don't tell us much of anything, because the big standardized tests are narrowly focused, poorly designed, and extremely limited in their scope. Furthermore, we can predict test score results pretty well just using demographic information. So to claim that we would be fumbling in the dark without these...