School testing systems should be examined in 2014 (interview with Linda Darling-Hammond)

This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Good morning. I'm David Greene. The United States has spent a decade trying to improve the standing of its schools compared to the rest of the world. Education researcher Linda Darling-Hammond says the result is disappointing.

LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND: We're actually not doing any better than we were doing a decade ago. In fact, the PISA tests, the international assessments, just came out a couple of weeks ago, and basically the story for the United States over the last decade or more is flatline.

GREENE: Darling-Hammond advised President Obama, but she's dismayed to see his administration continue the high-stakes testing introduced with President Bush's No Child Left Behind law. Darling-Hammond now directs Stanford University's Center for Opportunity in Education. She spoke to my colleague Steve Inskeep about the future of her profession. She noted the revolt by parents and educators against intensive testing and federal penalties for schools that come up short.

DARLING-HAMMOND: Principals in New York state, a third of them signed a petition against the tying of test scores to teacher evaluation. Parents are opting kids out of testing in many communities. Teachers at Garfield High in Seattle protested the misuse of a particular test. So it's spreading across the country.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Are there actually a lot of schools that have been penalized because their students, on average, were not measuring up under No Child Left Behind?

DARLING-HAMMOND: Well, yes. When No Child Left Behind was passed back in 2002, there was a target set for each year for each school that they would get to a place where 100 percent of students would be, quote/unquote "proficient" on the state tests. Researchers knew even then that would be impossible, and here we are coming into 2014 — which was the deadline — and about 80 or 90 percent of the schools in the country have failed this metric to have 100 percent of students proficient. And eventually, all of them will fail this particular target.

Read or listen to the full interview here.

For a description of Darling-Hammond's new book, Getting Teacher Valuation Right: What Really Matters for Effectiveness and Improvement, read a summary.

For more on Linda Darling Hammond's views on school reform, read this 2011 op-ed in the New York Times.