> I noticed that one of those two methods you linked to is the VAM method used in Houston, EVAAS.

Yes, and the other method mentioned on the same page was student growth percentiles, which is much closer to what I have been advocating. You seem to have a habit of focusing on what you want, regardless of what the person you are talking to is actually saying.

> And yet grades are still more effective at predicting college success than standardized tests.

I'm not sure why you say this like it's a mic drop. The point of saying "standardized tests help anchor GPAs" is to say that, without standardized tests, GPAs would become a worse predictor of future success. So, even if GPA alone is better, standardized tests help it be that way. More importantly, GPA+standardized test is better than either alone. You keep conveniently forgetting that last part when you advocate for the removal of standardized testing.

> And, umm, standardized tests are normed.

Only some of them are. Otherwise, you couldn't make claims like the following: https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2019-10-...

The tests in my state are not normalized but are instead standards-based: https://www.texasassessment.gov/en/staar-about.

> We don't trust teacher unions to decide who to fire. School districts decide.

Now you're just getting into semantic games. Unions help define the regulations that make it impossible to fire teachers, and they also use their money, influence, and legal might to fight against many firings.

https://www.americanexperiment.org/teachers-agree-teachers-u...

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ineffective-public-sch...

"They argue that existing public schools are not beyond saving. They suggest that reformers “commit to taking the tenure process seriously, rather than rubber stamping every eligible teacher for approval” and explain how this has been done in some New York City schools, where teachers immediately granted tenure fell from 94 percent to 56 percent. Such reforms are welcome, but they usually run into roadblocks from unions and stubborn regulators."

> Non-union charters schools haven't proved any better.

The data in this book beg to differ: https://www.amazon.com/Charter-Schools-Enemies-Thomas-Sowell...

Some charter schools in New York produced 10x or more as many students proficient in math and reading relative to nearby public schools, including public schools that shared the same building. There was no socioeconomic or racial diference between the schools.

Not all charter schools succeed, but the point is to find the ones that do and replicate their success: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20190259

> We now have, what, a full generation of students that have gone through high-stakes testing? When do we decide it's not worthwhile?

When do we finally settle on the fact that it is in fact worthwhile?

> In my view, all this noise about testing and teacher evaluation is meant to justify school privatization, so private companies can profit from all that public school money, and rich people can get tax-payer subsidized good private school education while poor people are left with the dregs.

Your world view is corrupt. You think private organizations are greedy and evil and yet somehow public organizations are magically saintly. You think apparently standardized scores in the U.S. are getting worse over time, despite there being more welfare programs than ever before, because kids aren't getting enough food benefits. Even the left-leaning Brookings institute can do better than that: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/12...

"Over the last 30 to 40 years, the United States has invested heavily in education, with little to show for it. The result is a society with more inequality and less economic growth; a high price."

One of my parents grew up in the 1950s before welfare reform. He got C's and D's in school because he spent most of his time working jobs to feed himself. Very few children are starving today at the level my parent did. Most of the "poor" today are richer than the middle class of 100 years ago. The reasons for lack of achievement go far beyond alleged malnutrition and far beyond an alleged lack of funding in schools.

I suggest you read "Life at the Bottom" by Dalrymple to get a better understanding of what many students are up against. The greatest predictor of academic success is whether or not the child is growing up in a stable 2-parent home. But that doesn't fit the progressive leftist narrative that seeks to destroy both religion and family.

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-47057787

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/S10680-017-9424-6

https://www.christianpost.com/news/2-parent-families-are-bes...

Some claim that socioeconomic status is the greatest predictor. But, guess what? 2-parent households do better socioeconomically. And, studies from countries with universal daycare like Sweden are showing that generations of students suffer from psychological problems due to not having a mother in the home: http://www.imfcanada.org/archive/1107/swedish-daycare-intern...

And, of course, religious is also highly correlated with better grades: https://www.marripedia.org/effects_of_religious_practice_on_...

As one person I admire has said, errant do-gooderism is akin to straightening the deck chairs on the Titanic. If you are a bad doctor, you see symptoms, diagnose the wrong illness, prescribe the wrong medication, and make your patients sicker. This allegory aptly describes the modern progressive movement, as well as most modern education fads.

The best thing we can do to improve education in the U.S. is school vouchers. This will allow more diversity in school makeup, better support religious schooling, which religion correlates with improved education, increase competition, which almost always benefits society, and improve the lot of socioeconomically disadvantaged parents who are currently stuck with poorly-performing public schools.

> That statement alone is meaningless.

Meaningless and high-level aren't the same thing. A statement doesn't need to go into specifics to provide meaning.