Education is boring

Wonderful words from our dear President -- from Yahoo News/Associated Press:

Obama says too much testing makes education boring
President Barack Obama said Monday that students should take fewer standardized tests and school performance should be measured in other ways. Too much testing makes education boring for kids, he said.

"Too often what we have been doing is using these tests to punish students," the president told students and parents at a town hall hosted by the Univision Spanish-language television network at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, D.C.

Obama, who is pushing a rewrite of the nation's education law that would ease some of its rigid measurement tools, said policymakers should find a test that "everybody agrees makes sense" and administer it in less pressure-packed atmospheres, potentially every few years instead of annually.

Good God... First we gut the school curriculum and now this moron proposes that we lower our standards even further. A bit more:

Obama, who has been pushing his education agenda all month, has expressed concern that too many schools will be unable to meet annual proficiency standards under the No Child Left Behind law this year. The standards are aimed at getting 100 percent of students proficient in math, reading and science by 2014, a goal now widely seen as unrealistic.

Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees. The NCLB Act was signed into law in 2002. They are saying that it is impossible to raise academic standards by 2014? Twelve Years Later? It took me twelve years to get from first grade, through high-school and to start my first year of college. They consider improving the schools to be unrealistic? They should not be dropping the testing requirements, they should be doing a top-to-bottom reform of the public school system. But of course, the teachers unions would never stand for that -- they grade on seniority rather than ability...