Sandy Kress wrote a Sept. 29 column for the Austin American-
Statesman entitled “Kress: The Facts on School Accountability.”
Sandy Kress is known as a key architect of the No Child Left
Behind (NCLB) education reform passed in 2002 and is now a
handsomely paid lobbyist for Pearson Education. Pearson is a
testing company which gets nearly $100 million a year for Texas
school exams and will have received $1 billion by 2015 according
to recent media reports. Not surprisingly, Sandy Kress claimed
that Texas test scores had benefited from NCLB, that minority
students have shown “amazing gains” under the National
Assessment for Education Progress (NAEP) and that we should
“stay the course.” Is it “fact” that Texas is knocking it out
the park on the NAEP due to accountability “working”? The NAEP
is a national exam that has been administered for the past 44
years by the National Center for Education Statistics. The test
is given to a sampling of students across the country in the
4th, 8th and 12th grades and is common