Fundamentally, I think most legislators are trying to fix our 19th century public school systems with 19th century paradigms of thinking. Teachers need to be invited and empowered to take time for curricular side trips for learning with their students, as David Warlick discussed in his keynote for last fall’s K-12 Online Conference. I think (based on my own experiences as well as research) NCLB and high stakes accountability has had tragic consequences for students and teachers in our U.S. schools.

I laud the move toward open source technologies which some school districts are embracing, and I think move toward open standards for student assessment systems would also be in the right direction. I do not think, however, that more accountability and more focus on standards is going to help us reinvent schools (design school 2.0) in the ways we need to for the 21st century information and economic environments

Open source, as pointed out in David Thornburg’s book, when the best are free, allows the funds
that are available to be repurposed for other uses.

I was thinking, that the problem with the post that I submitted is the same as with that of NCLB. We have not included creativity, constructivism, and what happened to the metadata, that would be collected so that students could step through at their own learning pace. I remember doing wonderful workshops with this idea in mind at NIST. The funds were shut down. Compete.org seems to have the message, just it is that they are not educators, but those who are worried about what it is that we are not doing.
Take a look. They have a most compelling video that is for sale, inexpensive that talks about next steps… Bonnie