might not have the expertise neces sary to develop 50 separate sets of tests, and the states will have to decide if they want to team up with other states to produce a joint test or to use an off-the-shelf test until they can develop their own Assessment is critical to making schools accountable and to identifying practices that make schools and teachers successful. The whole point of annual assessment is that it provides a very rich data source that can be used to help individual children and to identify where teachers' strengths and weaknesses lie. We know that if we look longitudinally at the classroom performance of children in a particular teachers classroom and find that every year those children miss certain objectives, the problem is probably the teaching strategy or the teacher s content knowledge, not the children. Assessment can be a wonderful tool for what professional development they need. If there are teachers whose students always do well with those ob jectives, let s observe those teachers more closely to uncover the keys to their success and then share those insight with other teachers We can also use the data to evaluate schools and school districts Although many people are not happy to hear me say that, the truth of the matter is that we are not running our school systems as we ll as we should I' m sorry if people are upset at that, but we have children for whom we are not providing even an adequate education, and those children deserve no less than a first-rate education No school system lacks the desire to do right by the ir students. They are under performing because they don t know how to do it differently. What happens over time is that underper formance erodes their morale; it erodes the teachers' belief that school performance is in their control, and they start saying, well I was very successful with the students I used to have, so it must be the students. And what we have to say is, yes, students have changed. They learn differently than we do. They are much more accustomed to receiving information in short bursts from interactive multimedia sources, which means it's a lot harder to get them to sit and listen to a lecture for 40 or 45 minutes than it was for some of us who grew up with books and other print media as our primary information sourcemight not have the expertise necessary to develop 50 separate sets of tests, and the states will have to decide if they want to team up with other states to produce a joint test or to use an off-the-shelf test until they can develop their own. Assessment is critical to making schools accountable and to identifying practices that make schools and teachers successful. The whole point of annual assessment is that it provides a very rich data source that can be used to help individual children and to identify where teachers' strengths and weaknesses lie. We know that if we look longitudinally at the classroom performance of children in a particular teacher's classroom and find that every year those children miss certain objectives, the problem is probably the teaching strategy or the teacher's content knowledge, not the children. Assessment can be a wonderful tool for principals and teachers to use to determine what professional development they need. If there are teachers whose students always do well with those objectives, let's observe those teachers more closely to uncover the keys to their success and then share those insights with other teachers. We can also use the data to evaluate schools and school districts. Although many people are not happy to hear me say that, the truth of the matter is that we are not running our school systems as well as we should. I'm sorry if people are upset at that, but we have children for whom we are not providing even an adequate education, and those children deserve no less than a first-rate education. No school system lacks the desire to do right by their students. They are underperforming because they don't know how to do it differently. What happens over time is that underperformance erodes their morale; it erodes the teachers' belief that school performance is in their control, and they start saying, well I was very successful with the students I used to have, so it must be the students. And what we have to say is, yes, students have changed. They learn differently than we do. They are much more accustomed to receiving information in short bursts from interactive multimedia sources, which means it's a lot harder to get them to sit and listen to a lecture for 40 or 45 minutes than it was for some of us who grew up with books and other print media as our primary information source