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Bring Back High-Stakes School Testing

Bring Back High-Stakes School Testing

The David Frum Show vor 1 Jahr

Former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on testing, accountability, and how to reverse the decade-long decline in U.S. student achievement. Plus: David Frum on Donald Trump’s cult of sycophancy.

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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum
opens with reflections on the strange and revealing controversy
over Donald Trump’s rumored commemorative coin and what it says
about the culture of flattery and self-abasement now defining MAGA
politics. Then David is joined by former U.S. Secretary of
Education Margaret Spellings for a candid look at the crisis in
American education. Spellings, a key architect of No Child Left
Behind and now president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, explains
why U.S. test scores began to stagnate years before COVID and why
the pandemic only deepened an accountability collapse already
underway. They discuss the successes in states like Mississippi,
the wasted billions in federal relief funds, and the political
backlash against testing that, Spellings argues, has left millions
of children behind. Finally, Frum turns to art and history with his
discussion of The Judgment of Paris by Ross King, a story of how
the impressionists overturned the art establishment of their time,
and what it teaches about how the future judges the present. Get
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