As a companion to its test score ranking nonsense, the Sun -Times offers the story of Kipling, a low-income CPS school that outranked many higher-income suburban schools, apparently by providing a well-rounded, challenging curriculum: "Kipling teachers are urged to move kids beyond the basics and into the kind of higher-ordered thinking tapped in the toughest Illinois Standards Achievement Test questions."

The Sun-Times reports this as though it's an anomaly, and, unfortunately, official CPS documents back them up. Remember, I pointed out recently how the CPS magnet school catalog differentiates their selective enrollment gifted and classical schools from other schools: "Both types of schools accelerate learning so that there is time for projects, term papers and group work that takes the learner deeper into the subject matter...Regional Gifted Centers place an emphasis on thinking, reasoning, problem solving and creativity.... Classical Schools place an emphasis on scholarship with a liberal arts focus."   

Research has shown that CPS students provided with intellectually challenging work can easily learn 50 percent more over the course of a year than students in the same building who are offered less challenging instruction. Sadly, rote teaching to the test -- the opposite of intellectually challenging work --  is not only encouraged in most CPS schools but demanded of them by the central office following a playbook written by politicians like Arne Duncan, corporate sponsors of school reform, and even the media, who continuously ratchet up the stakes on high-stakes standardized test scores. This dumbed-down approach has yielded little or no real progress in academic outcomes over the last few years.

It's time to abandon this no-win strategy and demand that our school leaders move the focus away from teaching to the test and toward authentic intellectual schoolwork. This requires true multiple measures including performance and classroom-based assessments. All children deserve that kind of education, not just those in gifted or wealthy schools.