This Monday, the News Journal is featuring an op-ed piece by
Margaret Spellings.    For the educational reformers to find
anyone still naive about the manipulations of test scores, they
had to go back to the Secretary of Education in 2005, and coax
her to write.  Back then George Bush was beginning his second
term. We were all naive back then.  Her  claim is that
accountability is what creates good test scores, is off mark…
 Furthermore her claim that we need even more accountability,
shows that her sensory feelers are not properly working.  First
here is what we do know about PISA.  There is no consistency
between nations tested.  How do you equivalently compare the
reading of  Chinese characters to the reading in the Finnish
alphabet, or the Bulgarian Cyrillic style, or  to a popular font
in English?  Of these four, who is the better reader when the
structure of those languages are all drastically different?
 Furthermore China has been exposed as only allowing testing in
its best schools.  Yet, Massachusett