Neither Ms. Abbott nor Superintendent Thompson has done much to earn such deferential press as accorded them by the NDN. Any reporter at The Chicago Tribune would have grilled them both on the hot seat. For a paper that so honors the cowboy-style of Mr. Bush, you'd think some reporter would have enough gumption to call Thompson out at High Noon. If no candidate for school board is willing to denounce the year's supervisory experience in CCPS, none deserve to be elected. This has been the worst year on record. Ms. Abbott claims, "We are going to see how students have progressed from third to 10th grades,” she said. “We have never had that type of data analysis before. We didn’t detect the trends and we didn’t solve the problems.” But Mr. Bush and his NCLB Act are on the way out. The worship accorded to the FCAT is idolatry of the worst kind. It won't take forever for the iconoclasts to smash the FCAT and other state spin-offs from NCLB. Hiring someone as superintendent whose dissertation and professional career is based on "An Analysis of Educational Expenditures and Educational Outcomes" valorizes test scores at the expense of flesh and blood teachers and students (custodians, food service people, and secretaries, too). It was and is a major mistake. People are more important than things; balance sheets and test results are things. To present a negative assessment of public education and promote radical reinvention of schools doesn't value people. The proposals are consistently from the top down and begin with the premise that the NCLB and its state assessment tests are a trumpet call for shaking up the schoolhouse or redesigning the school. But their true agenda is to enrich corporations. Idol worshipers among us always look for a magic new program that can be deployed in classrooms and unwittingly they feed corporations that publish and sell products and books. The sales techniques bury both the agenda and the negative assessment philosophy beneath the sugar-coating of packages named Successful Practices Network or Character Education or catchwords such as Rigor, Relevance, Relationships and Reflections (Reconstitution—wholesale replacement of staff). Placing expensive but ill-educated reading coaches in every school to bring up FCAT scores is worse than spending money on cement football fields. What such leaders as Ms. Abbott accomplish is a deflection of resources and a skewing of the real solutions needed in the classroom. There is no method or technique or package that can replace a well-educated experienced teacher adept in his or her subject area. Ms. Abbott should not be voted back onto the school board.