I've been citical in the past of your take on education acountability and I still believe that you can't bash the Texas system without acknowledging the real good that has come of it in many instances.

But here is where we agree. The imposition of high stakes and data driven accountability into politically charged environments is going to cause all sorts of responses. Teaching to the test is one. Taking resource away from students with the least hope of passing and those who will pass anyway in order to focus your efforts on thsoe students on the cusp is another. Cutting arts so you can hire more tutors in the subjects on the test is a third. Real cheating or lying about the results is a fourth.

Education isn't alone here. When the military went for this in the 1960s, you saw manipulation of body counts in Viet Nam, stange definitions of pacification so that we could count how many villages had been pacified etc. When police departments went to the Compstat type systems to use computer mapping and databases to track performance in crime stopping and suppression there were also side effects. Manipulation of sex crime statistics in Philadelphia is one of the real low points here. John Timoney had to reopen numerous cases that detectives had declared weren't rapes because they were going to be hard to solve and would have brought down the department's box scores. I use those analogies not because I think high stakes testing is murder or rape - far from it. I think accountability is important and appropriate testing and data collection is essential. But its no surprise that manipulation of drop out rates and test scores is happening. Politicization of the process is only going to make things worse.

We shouldn't throw the baby of the standards movement and the need to use data to properly hold schools accountable out with this bad bathwater. The sort of systems we are talking about offer the potential to drive real resources for remediation to where they are most needed. That is how the military uses data driven accountability at its best. Its also how Compstat is supposed to work.

Getting to this perfect world, however, is going to require a lot more work. And the administration's No Child Left Behind Act is not a promising vehicle towards a better system. I fear it will instead promote more of this sort of disingenuous response. Although its mandates that test scores be broken down by subgroup - so that we can see how poorer or minority students are doing in schools where they are often lost in the shuffle - is necessary there are huge problems. Most of these get real technical real fast - but given the accuracy of our tests and a system that can allow a school to fail based on the results of a subgroup of 20 or fewer students we have a system where good schools will fail just by chance one year and not the next. In addition to spurring panic and diversion of resources away from where they are most needed most. And after saying that they were going to suply the needed funding, the administration seems hell bent on pulling the fiscal rug out from under the whole thing. With states up against a fiscal crisis of their own, I'm deeply worried that you'll see a lot more smoke and mirrors and way too little real progress.