I saw a David Berliner lecture last night at Pace. To recap some of the highlights: according to Berliner, NCLB is "stupid." He argues that it's goals (including 100% proficiency) are designed in such an unrealistic manner as to lead one to believe that their sole goal is to embarass educators. Furthermore, he added quite a lot of interesting data on how testing fails to realize it's goals. More importantly, he talked a great deal about the negative consequences of testing on schools and school culture. I don't have a lot of time right now to explore his sources, or even deal with his arguments substantively right now; as readers may have surmised by our recent collective silence, this is a pretty crazy time of the year for teachers, but I thought I would at least try to get some discussion going about testing in general. Also, I'll be out of the country for a week, so expect a little bit more of the low frequency posting, at least from my end...