Is this what the future looks like?

Proof, as if it were needed, that ideology has nothing to do with political meddling in the classroom comes today from Great Britain. It came in the form of a news report in The Guardian of a House of Commons committee hearing. Testifying was Alan Johnson, education secretary in Britain's Labour Party government. He defended the emphasis on standardized testing imposed by Labour's Office for Standards in Education ("Ofsted" for short). The Guardian reports:

Speaking to the House of Commons education select committee, Mr Johnson said staff at a school in Nottingham had told him recently that they would like to see league tables [ranking schools by test scores] scrapped.

"I accept the pressure it puts, and the extra intensity and stress it puts on teachers, but it's absolutely the right thing to do," he said.

Mr Johnson gave his backing to "the whole kit and caboodle" of accountability for schools - from Ofsted inspections to national tests and exams and league tables.

He added: "If anything, we need to intensify that rather than relax."

Mr Johnson said it was "fundamental" that children should leave primary school with a mastery of reading and maths.

Sound familiar?

Under Prime Minister Tony Blair, Labour has won elections since the late 1990s with a "New Labour" set of moderately liberal policies similar to former U.S. President Bill Clinton's. School reform; "league tables," well publicized lists of schools' aggragate test scores; and pressure on classroom teachers to raise test scores is part of the "whole kit and caboodle" New Labour offers to the voters. It sounds more than a little bit like our No Child Left Behind regimen of mandatory testing and ranking of schools by aggragate test scores, doesn't it?

British educators, like the teachers in Nottingham or Harvey Goldstein of the Institute of Education in London, argue the league tables can't help but measure factors like "sex, ethnic origin and social class background" that the schools can't be held responsible for.

Sometimes we tie the failure of NCLB to President Bush and the Republican Congress, but we forget the NCLB bill was co-sponsored by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and passed Congress with broad bipartisan support. Again, the similarity between Ofsted's accountability measures and NCLB is striking.

If anything, the British system is more hostile to good classroom teaching than our own. And it's good politics. At today's committee hearing, Johnson was kidded about his political ambitions. Here's how the exchange went:

The Conservative MP for Reading East, Rob Wilson, told Mr Johnson he had "a few quid" on the outcome.

Mr Wilson asked: "When Tony Blair steps down next year and you take over as prime minister will your priority be, as his was, 'education, education, education'?"

The Labour chairman of the committee, Barry Sheerman, suggested at this point that the minister might like to restrict his answer to education policy.

In response to Mr Wilson's question, Mr Johnson said: "Yes. I would probably classify it as 'learning, learning, learning', but it's the same thing."

And I would classify it as politics, politics, politics. Unfortunately, bashing classroom teachers looks like good politics on both sides of the water.