An in-depth article describing Connecticut Education Commissioner Betty Sternberg Sternberg, and the reasons for her opposition to NCLB:
We've got better things to spend our money on," says Sternberg, explaining why she is opposed to a provision in the federal law that requires states to test students annually, beginning next year. "We won't learn anything new about our schools by giving these extra tests"...Posted by kswygert at May 10, 2005 09:46 AMConnecticut officials, like educators in several other states, argue that No Child Left Behind needlessly duplicates many of their own accountability measures, which were put in place long before the federal law and provide ample information about how students are performing...
Federal officials have fired back by accusing Connecticut of tolerating one of the nation's largest "achievement gaps"- the margin between low-performing minority students and high-performing white students. Spellings infuriated Connecticut officials by depicting opponents of No Child Left Behind as "un-American" in an interview for the PBS "NewsHour" program recently.
A Democrat who was named to run the Connecticut Department of Education in 2003, Sternberg says she is not opposed to standardized tests on principle. Indeed, she spent much of her 24-year career in the department developing the Connecticut Mastery Test, one of the oldest school accountability systems in the country. Her complaint is with the frequency of the tests, and how they are used by teachers.