Cigarettes and Twinkies

School Administrators Chief Paul Houston is at it again. Writing in Education Week [registration required, but oh-so-worth-it for this article], he lambasts the testing industry and picks apart recent studies that are praising NCLB.

Who has benefited the most from No Child Left Behind? Would it be the teachers, who have faced pressures complying with regulations that bear little relationship to sound educational practice? Perhaps it is the children, who have seen their classroom studies narrowed to allow for more time for testing and test preparation? No, so far the greatest beneficiary of this law is the testing industry, which has had more business than it can handle. This has led not only to higher profits, but also to inaccurate results and huge errors in scoring and reporting.

As he proved previously, Houston is great with the analogies. Here are two; out of context two might seem like overkill, but read the piece — they work:

Having the testing industry study the results of a massive program of testing is like having the cigarette industry do a study of lung cancer.

and

An educational program built around tests has the same validity as a nutritional program built around Twinkies.

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