I made this same comment on Diane's post over on Bridging differences, but what the heck:
"One only wishes that the proponents of this mean-spirited approach might themselves be subjected to a high-stakes test about their understanding of children and education!"

This echoes thoughts I've had for years. I always said it more or less tongue in cheek, but maybe we could bring some reality to it. How about creating such a test, and posting it online for people to take as they please and receive scores and feedback? Base it on good solid research, and include a bit of extra info on each question with the feedback? And then we could challlenge the powers that be to take it and make their scores public. If we could do that in a high-profile enough way, the least it could do is help make more people more well-informed about testing and kids, and perhaps get some public accountability going for some of those powers-that-be.

Accountability a system checklists drafted by some experts that usually focus on filling out forms and involve some punitive consequences.  Incrementalism the small changes made in education policy that have failed to produce any substantial results.  What we have been doing for the past 30 years has not worked. We do not need more internet connections, more tests, or more experts. What we need is more teaching in the classroom. Back to basics the three “R’s”.   We are failing our children and it is a national disgrace. 

"What we need is more teaching in the classroom. Back to basics the three “R’s”.   We are failing our children and it is a national disgrace. "

Yes, teaching is where the rubber hits the road.  But teaching does not happen in a vacuum.  What communities, administrators, politicians, "experts" do can either support good teaching or obstruct it.  What they do matters, to teachers and to children.  You cannot say "it's not this, it's that" when a whole system is involved, because every part of the system interacts with every other part.  Well, you can SAY it, but it's not helpful. We all must do our part--teachers, students, parents, and yes, administrators, politicians, and the private sector.  
Further, we need way more than "the basics", especially as defined by some old-fashioned notion of the 3 R's.  I'm saying "more than", not "instead of" here.  
Nor would I say we are massively failing our children.  We are failing some of them, even many of them, and that failure is not evenly distributed demographically.  But let's not exaggerate or be too negative.  A lot of teachers are doing an excellent job, many of our kids are learning and doing amazing things.  It doesn't do them any good to have people making blanket statements about about massive fialure, without any acknowledgement of the good work they are doing, often under difficult circumstances and ins spite of the system that surrounds them.

I'm realy concerned that threads like these obscure the more positive implications of rapid change in education. Pretending that everything is incremental ignores the very technology we use to make that pretense. Educational change is NOT incremental; it does NOT take extensive in-service coursework to have high school kids teach teachers how to use the net; nor does it take years for schools to transform. 

Citing Ravich and Darling Hammond on the same set of threads as if they had anything in common ignores their lifetime of fairly opposed work and research. The current strategies rippling through Duncan, et.al., do NOT imply the need for "5000 trained principals" to replace the dead and dying schools that ought to be closed. Many of those schools should never re-open. Many of our districts are horribly over-built, horribly over-staffed, and horribily managed.

Decades ago when Jerry Miller closed the kid-jails in Massachusetts, he forced communities to find better ways to deal with delinquency. So also might Duncan's "reform" force many of those same communities to re-examine what they mean by education. For many, many, many too many it is a kind of warehouse that keeps a labor market from productivity for 20 or so years until a vintage can be earned through time alone. That's ridiculous, on its face and in face.

Re-conceiving education is not a top down, nor bottom up enterprise. This whole thread is woven of half-baked and naive presumptions that ignore both the depth of the problem and the reality of its solution: schools and teachers should prove themselves daily, as should kids and older students. The entire process demands a kind of respect that neither standard tests nor rigid rules recognize. That respect involves recognizing the aspirations of children, parents and communities, and creating - actually re-creating - the resources to realize those aspirations throughout our institutions. The technology on which I write this is a perfectly appropriate tool do do just that. And it is, really, that simple. If I can say this, you can do that: and that kind of dialog, built around "project" or "problem" based learning is the way kids learn now - and always did learn. It's the way people like Ellen Langer describe as "mindfulness," or Jerry Bruner constructed cognitive models to reflect. And it is as obvious as that 10 year old who got a letter from the President excusing her absence from the last day of school: it is the romance of the interaction between data and authorities, between ideas and their realization in action, between concepts and careers.