State Standards on the Hot Seat

Teachers have known this for sometime: state standards have been eased in the wake of NCLB to give the illusion of raised test scores.  The New York Times article lays it out, including this excerpt relating to New York teachers:

Some states raised standards in one subject but lowered them in another, including New York, which raised the rigor of its fourth-grade-math standard but lowered the standard in eighth-grade reading, the study said.

It merits raising a broader question, too.  Not just the controversy of how some states played with testing standards, but the problem of using these kinds of tests to compare students at all.