When the testers don't perform

This week it is just plain "outage"

Boy, watching Tennessee's standardized testing regime's derailment this week has confirmed our decision last year to pull our daughter out of Metro public schools. The naked hypocrisy and outright shame of a high-stakes testing regime--which pushes kids into performance anxiety--sputtering and stalling under its own inept weight and low performance are proper payback for the toll the system took on us and many others.

Maybe someone should test the testers.

Forget it. That will never happen. They will just go on bumbling through the future, coercing kids to prove themselves over and over by standards that may or may not have anything to do with teaching kids to think critically or to become functioning citizens in a democracy.

This waiver is good for the Metro public school students who are going to have their grades reflect their actual academic performance in real classrooms for once. That beats being measured by an arbitrary stick imposed upon public education under duress by the special interests of business lobby groups and chambers of commerce and enforced by flawed federal policies.

It won't be long before Tennessee's education apparatus rights itself and this cycle of psychological violence and abuse starts all over again. Our public school children will be reduced again to survivors before long.

In the meantime, payback is a bitch, ain't it?