PETRILLI: "An Enormous Distortion" Of Obama's Position

While there's no dispute that the topic of portfolio assessment came up on NPR this morning during a discussion about Obama's education platform, Fordham's Mike Petrilli seems to be the only one who thinks that the Obama campaign revealed any big change of its position on NCLB accountability (ie, the desire to "dump") standardized testing. 

Observers suggest that there was no explicit connection made between portfolios and getting rid of standardized assessments.  EdWeek's Michele McNeil says the same, and has a rough transcript here. And the campaign says there's no there there, calling Petrilli's remarks "an enormous distortion."  Here's Obama talking about testing in Thornton, CO a couple of months ago, from the campaign:

“This doesn’t mean that we won’t have a standardized test, I believe children should master that skill as well and that should be part of the assessments and tools that we use to make sure our children are learning. It just can’t dominate the curriculum to the extent where we are pushing aside those things that will actually allow children to improve and will accurately assess the quality of teaching that is taking place in the classroom. This is not an either/or proposition, it is a both/and proposition, and that’s what we will be working on by fixing NCLB.”

No big deal. We all get things wrong sometimes.  (I posted the fake Palin SAT scores a couple of weeks ago.)  But it's too bad if Petrilli can't say so.  Being in DC too long has that effect on people.