The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better

For decades we’ve been studying, experimenting with, and wrangling over different approaches to improving public education, and there’s still little consensus on what works, and what to do. The one thing people seem to agree on, however, is that schools need to be held accountable—we need to know whether what they’re doing is actually working. But what does that mean in practice?

High-stakes tests. Lots of them. And that has become a major problem. Daniel Koretz, one of the nation’s forem...