A watershed moment?

It was a story tailor-made for the gaping 24-hour news maw and the talk shows — an Ohio sixth-grader was denied a bathroom break during standardized testing and had an accident. And the outcry was predictable — “What was that teacher thinking?”

If you’ve had to administer a standardized test, you know exactly what she was thinking. If you haven’t — or if you need a particularly eloquent way to ’splain it to your friends and neighbors, check out Dan Brown at the Huffington Post. He recalls his own stint in the pressure-cooker of standardized testing (he had to deal with vomit, not urine, but not sure who came out ahead on that one) and argues that it’s time to stop the “overblown emphasis of standardized testing” of NCLB:

Perhaps a sensational breaking point, like the Ohio child forced to pee in class, can give us the wakeup call we need to change the system. This is a solvable problem.

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