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afraid I do not cpmpletely agree with Barnett. First, I don't think the team on education so far would qualify as outstanding. Second, for all the words offered that SEEM to criticize the kinds of tests we are currently using, much of the rhetoric of the speech was in a similar mode to the last administration and the ones before that, things like international comparisons, for example. It might help if the speech had not had a number of significant factual errors - the dropout rate has not tripled in the past 30 years, rather in the 30 period ending in 2000 the precentage of students being held back in 9th grade rose from 4 to 12 percent.

I do agree that there are problems with value-added estimates. I remember that the claims made for those in Tennessee by William Sanders, such as his contention that the effects of a single teacher could be measured for 3 years out, were discounted by both of the independent analyses required by the TN State Auditors Office.

As for pay for performance - there is still the basic concern of what is being measured for performance? And inevitably the only component that some are willing to accept are student test scores. Which will put us right into the mess that Donald Campbell first indicated in 1978: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."