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It's an argument that seems to bubble up cyclically. It doesn't matter what the hot policy idea du jour is, someone is bound to assert: What we're doing right now does not serve the needs of the gifted!

The tests also matter because students who score seventy-five or better on the New York State English Regents are exempt from remedial reading and writing classes in the City University of New York. But that is only part of the story. Three-quarters of the 17,500 freshmen at the community colleges this year have needed remedial instruction in reading, writing or math, and nearly a quarter of the freshmen have required such instruction in all three subjects. Thanks to a recent article by Michael Winerip in the New York Times we now know why students score much better on the English Regents. The exam is much easier than the others. In fact it is so easy that it does not even measure basic student literacy. It also calls into question the reliability of standardized tests to measure anything about schools, let alone teacher performance, and the whole federal Race to the Top program.

Early in the life of No Child Left Behind, one amateur but insightful futurist on the Shanker Institute Board remarked to me: "Well, if you tie teacher pay, labeling failing schools, and evaluations of teachers and principals all to student test results-guess what?-you'll get student test results. But some 20, years down the road when these kids get out of high school, we may discover they don't know anything." 

Four city high schools have been under investigation since as far back as January 2010 for alleged Regents tampering or scoring inflation that could have fraudulently boosted their graduation rates, The Post has learned.

The story in Atlanta is about race, gender, poverty, social class, and, of course, power. It's about fairness and integrity, about leadership and about failures of leadership, and it's also about social responsibility and the abdication of that responsibility.