But what is enforced mediocrity costing us in the long run? On the national level, deficits in innovation. And locally, beating the love of learning out of our youth with the constant drumbeat of “certification is all that matters” sacrifices excellence on every level.

It’s a cost that no one politician will be called to account for, and nobody making decisions now will ever be held responsible for it. But I’d be willing to bet that it’ll cost us more in the long run than would staffing and equipping schools adequately now to actually teach, taking into account students’ learning differences.

Those results are clear: high-stakes tests turn out to have essentially no effect on student achievement as measured by test scores. Some studies find a small improvement. Some find a small decline. Nobody has found an important improvement.

I’m not talking about scores on the high-stakes tests themselves–of course those are up. Which proves that it’s possible to teach to a test if the test is repetitive enough from year to year.

But on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the only real national achievement test we have, the effects of No Child Left Behind are invisible. Schools don’t do special prep for the NAEP, partly because there’s no reporting by school, so there’s no punishment.

But it’s not that nobody knows how to help kids learn better. During the time of the War on Poverty and school desegregation, the “achievement gap” between black and white kids was cut in half.

That worked.

During the period of high-stakes testing, there’s been almost no change.

Yes, people are paying more attention to kids who score low, and that’s a good thing. But the kind of attention they’re getting doesn’t seem to do any good.