Would national testing really improve our schools?

Now that Bill Gates has offered to write new “national standards” and a national exam to go along with them, and many of our most influential opinion makers, including usual opponents like Joel Klein and Diane Ravitch, appear to support this notion as a solution to the country’s educational problems – I have a question:

Why wouldn’t a national test be open to the same sort of grade inflation than the state tests are now? With rampant test prep, cheating, narrowing of the curriculum, and all the rest – as predicted by Campbell’s Law?

And wouldn’t this lead to the loss of one of our few semi-objective measures of how schools are doing – the NAEPs?

The NAEPs, after all, are considered more reliable than state tests for a number of reasons which derive directly from the fact that they are not used for accountability purposes and no stakes are attached to theo9r results.

Only a random sample of students are assigned to take these assessments and because of their low-stakes nature, many of the questions can remain the same over the years, which makes the scaling (or difficulty level) more consistent; finally, there is little or no concerted attempt on the part of districts or schools to “game” the system.

Again, why do is there this national obsession with testing, and assuming that with more or better testing, more learning will follow? Where’s the evidence for this anywhere, in the research or the experience of any state or district? In North Carolina, the state that led the nation in terms of emphasizing standards and testing, the chair of a recent blue-ribbon commission concluded,

“We’re testing more but we’re not seeing the results....We’re not seeing graduation rates increasing. We’re not seeing remediation rates decreasing. Somewhere along the way testing isn’t aligning with excellence.”

Finland, whose students score the highest in the world on the international assessments called the PISA, has no standardized tests in their schools, which, as the Washington Post points out, is “a stark contrast to the current test obsession in this country.”

Since when did more or better testing become identified as more learning? Or am I missing something here? Please post your responses on the blog.