Their use spread after the 2002 No Child Left Behind law required states to test in third to eighth grades every year, giving school districts mountains of test data that are the raw material for value-added analysis.
Recently he took Mr. Tao, the visiting physicist, to a nearby mountain to test the effectiveness of removing dead leaves from the ground to reduce radiation levels.
Meanwhile, there is speculation that children will effectively be given a pass or fail at the end of each school year – and, among teachers, a fatalistic belief that, whatever its drawbacks, the current mountain of targets and tests will remain because schools have got so used to it.
The Team Sky leader finished 1min 3sec behind stage winner Bert-Jan Lindeman of Lotto-Jumbo on the first real mountain test of the Tour of Spain.
It was the last mountain test of the Tour, an 89-mile course that featured five climbs.
Both Alberto Contador and the 2014 winner, Vincenzo Nibali, lost time in the first serious mountain test of this year's race, where the stage win and the yellow jersey went to the Belgian Greg Van Avermaet, who built a five-minute advantage that should comfortably sustain him as far as the Pyrenees.
"Vaccines stand on an enormous mountain of evidence and stood the test of time".
Both chambers of Congress want school accountability to be grounded in the results of such standardized examinations, but their negotiators have not resolved the politically charged question of how to judge schools by the mountains of data the tests will produce.
When Riccardo Riccò of Italy, winner of two mountain stages, tested positive, he was escorted off the team bus by French gendarmes wearing the kepi, that high, round cap with the exaggerated visor, adapted from the desert garb worn by the French Foreign Legion in Algeria circa 1830.
Results of tests on a further 4,000 sheep brought down from the mountains are due early this week.
His fellow Scots did not receive it enthusiastically but the poets of Black Mountain College, a testbed of the arts in North Carolina, embraced it warmly.
