Disappointing education policy

It was very disappointing to hear Barack using the same, tired metaphors for education that we've heard from the Republicans: "reward the good teachers and fire the bad ones". How do you identify good teachers? Standardized tests! Let's have one standardized test for the whole country! Sigh... I posted a quick comment at whitehouse.gov:

In remarks today, you outlined a strategy to "reward good teachers and fire bad ones". It is very disappointing to hear you use this kind of rhetoric. We need to move beyond a system that pretends to "measure" a few things and rewards the people that figure out how to game the system. We need to think hard about how to build a culture of learning and independence among students -- not just prepare students to score well on standardized tests. The culture of educational "measurement" is destroying our schools because we don't know how to measure anything of any real importance. Please don't listen only to one side of the educational measurement community: find some of the critics and develop an overall strategy that values more than test scores.