More testing! Apparently the Secretary of Education is in favor of expanding the types of testing, per the NYT:

Margaret Spellings, the education secretary, suggested on Friday that the federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires that public school children be tested in reading and math, could be expanded to include other subjects.


"I am a strong believer in this, 'what gets measured gets done' kind of notion," Ms. Spellings told members of the American Federation of Teachers at their summer meeting here.

The problem I have w/critics of NCLB is that it really may improve accountability: for example, in this district, the number of classified students getting Regents diplomas has skyrocketed in the last couple of years (this district, whatever its other flaws, has one of the highest Regents rates for classified students in Nassau County). I asked about the continuum of placements in district and where students would have been placed a couple of years ago (e.g., before collaborative, would they have gone into self-contained classes), and an assistant director answered me quite truthfully that ten years ago, disabled students would not have been encouraged to get a Regents diploma, which gave families less incentive to try a general education placement. I don't like it, but it does seem to work that way.

I had an interesting talk with an ESL teacher a couple of months ago and she made the same comment: because of NCLB, there is increased accountability and better tracking of ESL students and their progress.

Which doesn't negate the fact that the notion of testing as the accountability measure is so problematic, as are the ways in which accountability is enforced (i.e., the blunt instrument of federal funding). The act of testing itself seems to be performative, not what's being measured or "learned" about the student population.