That's fine - you've just adopted a different philosophy, one of the "other ways of knowing" rather than science.
My point is that NCLB...
I'm not arguing for NCLB, I'm arguing that objective, comparable and reproducible measurements are the only viable way to optimize a system.
If you want to argue some specific metric is flawed, do it. Explain what should be measured and how the particular metric differs from it (i.e., details). So far, not a single person in this thread has actually done that - the closest we came was this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4713558
I would love it if we did proper science with education. I would love it if we did it with software development. In neither case has anybody put forward sufficient resources to do real science in these realms. Not science sufficient to replace human judgment.
Until we can, I don't think cargo cult science is the way to go. Half-assed studies on software development methods, counting simple metrics for developers, measuring teachers through simple standardized tests: all cargo cult science.
For now, I'd much rather rely explicitly on human judgment. It's not as good as actual science, but it's much better than pseudoscience.
My point is that NCLB is scientific in the same way Taylorism was: it's a cargo cult activity that takes on the trappings of science and looks for something easy to measure. And then uses those measures in ways that aren't scientifically validated at all.