In article , Gunner says...

Standards are not controls.

Umm, OK, agree. In the purest form, that is.

Accreditation is a form of control. If you
refuse to graduate students who can pass standardized testing, you
loose your accreditation. No parent will send their child to an
inferior school if they can help it, when there are others on hand. If
your school cannot meet the simple requirement of graduating students
able to pass the national standardized testing..then the funding
agency can say the vouchers are not to be used at that school.

But there will be other, non-academic reasons for a school
to lose its accreditation. Right, here's where you say
"No Way" but facts are facts, if you can't keep politics
from screwing up *local* school boards, what kind of chance
do you have from preventing it from happening on a federal
level??

I do however agree that all politics HAVE to be kept out of the design
of the Nationwide Standardized Academic testing Standard. It has to be
uniform, and apply to each and every normal school, be it private or
public.

So you're telling me that all school now basically have to
obey whatever the federal government instructs them to do,
or they lose their ability to operate. That sounds like
'bad gummint' on the loose here! There's simply no way
you can keep something like that from becoming politicized.
It's a nice dream, I admit, but it'll never happen.

The state's rights folks would fight this tooth and nail.

Jim

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