In fact, I would like to see decentralization take place on such a level that no school board, state agency or federal department would have anything to do with telling us what schools are good. I strongly suspect that the ideal school, from the standpoint of any government expert, would be vastly different from the kind of school conservatives would be most impressed by. Standardized testing will always be interpreted as needed more centralized answers on every level. If we went back to the school system we had a hundred years ago, we would have a better society, more educated and moral graduates and no standardized tests. These tests are a creature of the education system that conservatives generally see as a disaster.
Conservatives have a strange attraction to testing.
Probably because they want to operate on the basis of the truth. The truth of standardized testing is the truth of the educational establishment and not the truth of individual students in real schools. As conservatives, we need to admit that standardized testing is not the answer. The answer is an army of impassioned teachers committed to teaching students, not producing test scores.