what's missing from RTTT

While reading up on everything there is to know about Race To The Top (and you know there's a ton we don't know about RTTT), I feel there is something very important missing. I would call it the core problem with most major national legislation: actual input from real, in-the-classroom-right-this-moment teachers.

This is my first year dealing with serious, interrupting-my-teaching-on-a-regular-basis standardized testing. And by standardized testing, I mean online statewide FAIR testing, district reading benchmark tests, and math unit tests given on district-mandated dates regardless of whether my students have had time to master the curriculum. I've taught FCAT testing grades for the last 6 years, so I'm not new to the testing game. The problem is the data all these tests are accumulating is not an accurate measure of most of my students' abilities according to my personal observations.

I have one student, let's call him Science Boy, who loves reading non-fiction and comes up with super high-level questions regarding anything we are studying. For example, we play a great game about once a week where I put a long word on the board and the kids come up with words made from the letters all day. Any words five letters or longer get a point toward our class behavior goal, so there's an incentive to come up with great words. Science Boy lives for this game. Once he sees it on the board in the morning, he grabs a think pad and starts brainstorming during any free moment. He is a constant annoyance on these days ("Miss Lynn, how do you spell 'curious'?" "Will 'mentor' work?" After pointing him toward a dictionary several weeks in a row to answer his questions, he now saves me the trouble and gets one to start the day). He's got some ADHD issues and sits right next to me to help him focus, but he's very bright. According to FAIR data, however, he has a 10%-18% chance of passing FCAT. His weekly reading and periodic benchmark tests are above average, and his Accelerated Reader level is right where he needs to be for this time in 4th grade. He constantly needs to be reminded to slow down, which is where I suspect the problem lies in regards to his FAIR test scores. But according to the genius that is the FAIR report, I need to be small-grouping Science Boy to death.

Before all of this standardized-test-before-THE-standardized-test nonsense, I would not have worried much about Science Boy. I would have worked on his focus, encouraged him to read higher non-fiction books and some historical or math-related fiction, and then focused my extra energy on those students not performing as well. Honestly, that IS what I'm doing anyway. And thankfully my administration is encouraging us to use this new data only as another piece of the puzzle instead of the end-all, be-all of what students can accomplish. But I know there will come a point where I will have to prove I'm fixing Science Boy's "problems" instead of focusing on my real strugglers that FAIR, ironically enough, predicts will pass the FCAT with no problems. I'm also worried that new teachers will come to trust this data more than their own observations and opinions.

So I'm looking for the portion of RTTT that focuses on observations from classroom teachers. You know, those people actually trained to notice students' problems. I'll guess my chances of doing so are less than 10%.