A friend of mine just let me know this was posted over here. I regret that i do not have time to respond to all the comments - I have received several hundred emails directly as a result of the posting at the Washington Post. I will when I have time come back and read through and where appropriate offer responses. For now I want to acknowledge that many of you are taking the time to offer thoughtful comments, even if I may think you misunderstand either purpose of the piece or why I wrote it. Let me offer a few general comments.

1. No Child Behind does not exist in isolation. Before it there were A Nation At Risk and Goals 2000, both of which are part of the ethos from which NCLB flowed. Since NCLB, Race to the Top has if anything made thingsworse.

2. Unlike its predecessors, NCLB had punitive sanctions that began to distort the learning process. When the courses I taught in government were in 9th grade, we began seeing kids arrive at our high school with NO social studies to speak of in elementary or middle school, because those subjects were not tested for Adequate Yearly Progress, the standard by which schools were measured under NCLB.

3. I did not teach just elite students. My last 7 years I taught both the regular level government classes and AP US Government and Politics. For the 1st 6 of those years half of my sections were in each course. The last year 4 were AP. Thus I taught a spectrum of abilities. Nevertheless, the gifted students in my AP classes were decreasingly ready to handle the kind of thinking necessary for that course.

4. do not presume that I EVER resorted to drill and kill for tests. But I fought losing battles. The school system began demanding every teacher in every course do system designed benchmarks. But in AP there was not a common curriculum, because each AP teacher had to submit his or her own syllabus to the College board. I approached the material in a different fashion, one which served my students well both as to their learning but also in how they performed on the AP exam. And yet they would be required to sit for poorly designed tests often on material I had not yet addressed in class.

5. Because test scores began to matter so much, the school system wanted interim tests, which scores broken out by indicators, with teachers required to explain why students had scored poorly on some indicators and to present a plan of remediation. Again, I did not follow the county pacing guide, which may be why I had the best performance in any of the 20+ high schools on the state exam - one year I had 129 students sit for the state exam and 126 passed - ten of those passing having failed all four quarter with me. Certainly I had demonstrated that my students were prepared. Perhaps I should have been asked to draft the pacing guide. At least when it came to AP, I was asked to run a Saturday course to which students from other schools could come to get assistance from me. But when I get told that I am REQUIRED to waste time on tests on material my students have not yet studied and then waste more time explaining why they did not do well on certain indicators, I think you can begin to understand some of my frustration.

I was for a while the only teacher on the county wide panel designing how our school system was going to tie teacher evaluation to student performance, a requirement under Race to the Top. I disagreed with the notion, but was asked both by central office administrators and by the executive director of the union to serve because I understood the literature as well as anyone in the county. We worked hard, designed a system, did some beta testing, only to have the state reject it because we did not meet some percentage on one criteria that they had arbitrarily set at 20% and we had set at 15%, in agreement among the testing office, the top administration, teachers, counselors, etc.

What is happening to our students as result of educational policy which focuses on testing - and in this case NCLB is the primary culprit - is denying them a meaningful learning experience. Because we put so much weight on the test scores, the focus in the school and the classroom becomes those tests, increasingly to the exclusion of other things.

My article for Academe only scratched the surface of what is wrong.

My warning, however, is real, and it is not just about the students arriving on college campuses. There are already proposals to evaluated professors in schools of education on the basis of the test scores of K-12 students taught by their graduates. Let me be blunt - this is idiotic. The professional literature does NOT support evaluating those K-2 teachers by student test scores, not even when using value-added assessments, which have all kinds of problems that have still not been solved. To attempt to use them to draw valid conclusions at one further step away from what the tests were designed to do - which is to measure what students can do at one particularly moment in time - is downright dangerous.

As to those who think teachers still have the ability to use their own best judgment, perhaps to learn the appropriate research and apply it on their own? That ignores that increasingly we are seeing superintendents who want everyone on the same page at the same time, with rigid pacing guides, whether the students can move faster or need to move slower.

Before I was a teacher I worked with computers for 20 years. The old IBM cards were clearly labeled "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate." At least they were standard - in size, in how information was recorded.

Our students are not standard. And what we are doing to them is folding, spindling, and mutilating - their natural love of learning, their ability to draw meaning from their studies.

It is one reason why they will be less and less prepared for post-secondary education.

It is why the fastest growing classes on many campuses are remedial courses to make up for what they didn't learn in high school, even if they passed all the required tests with flying colors.