My life’s work is education, and having studied these issues for decades, I know that …

Teaching to tests actually lowers our educational standards because the tests over-emphasize low-level knowledge and skills and are forcing districts nationwide to ignore more important and higher-level student outcomes.

These “data-systems” just means making education more coercive and test-driven. Teachers can assess kids just as well as the tests, and we’re already paying them to do it. Like other countries with great educational systems, we need to make authentic learning the point of education, not passing tests.

As a teacher educator for 27 years, I can tell you that the best and brightest are often turning away from teaching because of the emphasis on testing, and because teachers and administrators are now routinely required to do things they consider unwise, educationally unproductive, and unethical–all in the name of raising test scores.

Decades of research show that carrot-and-stick motivation is counterproductive in the long run for students and teachers alike, and yet the department of education is demanding states toe the line and engage in counterproductive practices, just so they can get a little extra money.

Those of us who know learning, development, and motivation well just shake our heads and say “They just don’t understand education.” It’s simply the wrong paradigm for education.

My student teachers talk of schools being like prisons now. The DOE isn’t moving us into a brighter tomorrow–it’s wrapping outdated and failed approaches in lovely sounding language and trying to sell it to the public.

We should be banding together to stop test-driven education because it dumbs-down curriculum, undermines healthy motivation, and requires us to ignore most of what really matters for our children and for America. Like a fad diet, the NCLB ideas sometimes feel effective in the short run, but they are terribly counterproductive in the long run.

And P.S., competition of the sort the DOE is promoting also undermines average outcomes for students, and performance for workers like teachers. But hey, why listen to someone who teaches curriculum year round and teaches doctoral courses in motivation–let’s keep on letting lawyers and engineers and CEOs and politicians tell us how to improve schools.

Wake up and smell the research folks: We’re heading at high speed down the wrong track. It’s time to turn the train around, not race ahead faster.