Yesterday, the Record-Journal published a story on Connecticut’s Smarter Balanced assessments and the field test scheduled to be administered this spring. The story quotes Wendy Lecker at length, and I thought that it would be helpful for my readers to translate what Lecker said into what she actually means:

The field test “is a trial run of the assessment system that helps ensure the assessments are valid, reliable, and fair for all students. It also gives teachers and schools a chance to gauge their readiness in advance of the first operational assessment in spring 2015,” according to the Smarter Balanced assessment consortium’s website.

What the state is doing, Lecker said, is having “the majority of the kids … be guinea pigs.”

What Lecker is saying here is that parents should actively try to sabotage their schools’ efforts to measure performance. They should try to prevent the tests from being “valid, reliable and fair.”

Next year, Lecker will argue, “You can’t use last year’s scores as standards. With so many children opting out last year, there isn’t a representative sample!”

This is the equivalent of state legislatures opting out of Medicaid expansion as part of a concerted effort to prevent people from enjoying the benefits of Obamacare. If everyone thinks Obamacare is a failure, then we can repeal it!

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have found the Left’s version of the Tea Party! Just as the Tea Party seems to believe Americans don’t have a right to affordable, quality health care unless they live in rich, white suburbs, Lecker and her ilk apparently believe that Connecticut’s children don’t have a right to a quality education that puts them on par with the rest of the nation.

Unless, of course, they live in rich, white suburbs.

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