About Joel Klein's "results"

I would like to engage you in one of your favorite issues, which is the use and abuse of tests. Over the past few months, as I was finishing my book, I became aware of the startling extent to which the New York State Education Department has manipulated the state test results. So, while politicians crow about their "success" in raising test scores (as if they had anything to do with students' learning!), it turns out that the tests have been rigged in recent years to produce higher scores. The more I learned, the more I wondered if New York was on its way to becoming a national laughing-stock.

I wrote two articles about this. The first one appeared in the New York Post in August under the headline "Toughen the Tests." The article actually was NOT a call to toughen the tests, but a call to tell the truth. I wrote it to alert our new state education commissioner, David Steiner, who assumes his position on Oct. 1, to the scandalous manipulation of test scores by the agency he will lead.