Hillary Clinton wouldn’t “opt out”.  That’s according to her visit with the Newsday editorial board. Exemplifying why union leaders jumped into the deep end of the Hillary pool early on, why teachers would question the honesty and integrity of their union leaders and this candidate, and why thinking parents everywhere will be left to wonder who to vote for.

Hillary apparently:

…opposes evaluating teachers based on student test results as long as the tests are flawed, and thinks the question of whether they’d ever be good enough to rate teachers on is too hypothetical to answer right now.

and believes that:

the creation of the national standards was a bipartisan idea of the nation’s governors that practically everyone supported.

[Here Newsday adds: “She’s right. Until kids started failing to pass the tougher tests and meet the tougher standards, everyone was in favor of them.” in typical suburban mom shame-style]

On rating teachers with tests-once they become “good enough”-“Too hypothetical” is a weak escape route. How about “Tests alone cannot adequately define or measure the most important things teachers are obligated to do in our most challenging neighborhoods and with our most challenging students.”

The thrust of this article was to show that Clinton wouldn’t support the opt-out choice for her own granddaughter, but I imagine that children this supported and enriched would not have too much problem with the tests, anyways. Yeah, you can try to prove something regarding opting out and give an eighth grade math test to a dufus mayor, town council, or a school board here or there, show that they won’t do it, or don’t do so well and say “Aha!”…

But the real issue is that the tests are often developmentally inappropriate for your average child and are designed in a way to suggest that a Clinton grand-baby type student is the standard we should expect of all children.

Well of course the children of richy-rich world travelers will do well and their families may not mind tests- they know their child’s ivy league future from the moment they are born. As long as they get a warm, experiential, gentle type of schooling that merely enhances the life they get outside of school-what’s a little test? (“Just shows how smart my kid is compared to “the poors”, but I already knew that”).

The charter school peddlers love tests, because their whole focus is test performance and if they design their enrollment and programs to target scores they will perform well on test-score comparison to traditional schools left serving the general population.

Maybe when the push is for needs-based funding and equity in opportunities and enrichment, the investments come for community supports to help families send students to school ready to learn, and the effort is put into a holistic form of accountability that measures the future citizen (not market-ready worker bee)-then we can talk about valid assessments to measure impacts of instruction-as a piece of shared accountability.

It takes a village- right, Hillary?