Diane Ravitch's "Slaying Goliath" Documents Decades of Disruption - part 2 by John Thompson:

“ Decades of Disruption-driven reform began with the false claim “that American education was failing and the only way to fix it was with standards, tests, competition, and accountability.” No Child Left Behind & The Race to the Top set impossible test score targets, based on the idea that“no-excuses” pedagogies could be quickly “scaled up,” providing poor children of color a ladder to economic equality by reformer rigid conditioning via punishments & rewards. The fatal flaw, Ravitch says: “Behaviorists, & the Disrupters lack appreciation for the value of divergent thinking, and the creative potential of variety. Perhaps their worst debacle was using value-added teacher evaluations to hold each individual educator accountable for test score growth. It combined inappropriate test outputs with an unreliable and invalid algorithm, the VAM, as a club to enforce compliance.”