Below is a link to an op-ed piece by Diane Ravitch, a well known educational historian and former assistant secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan, the misperception of whose legacy has made him a darling of the right (see here).

It was Reagan who started us down the path towards standards and testing in the 1980s as a consequence of his often repeated public response to his 1983 Commission on Excellence in Education report "A Nation At Risk". He argued that public education was a "monopoly" and by implication was impervious to change. GHW Bush followed in Reagan's footsteps with exactly the same argument. The ideas associated with standards, testing, vouchers, and charters were given life during the 12 years of Reagan and Bush.

But there were subsequent and significant contributions by those who followed--Clinton (standardized testing in reading and math for Grs. 3, 7 & 11, an idea that derived from when he was governor and introduced statewide testing in high schools in 1980 in Arkansas), GW Bush (NCLB which simply took Clinton's idea and multiplied it by more grades and subject matter with potential consequences for failing schools), and Obama (Race To The Top as well as the linkage between teacher evaluations and student test scores). The current push to link teacher evaluations and student test scores has evolved over the past 25+ years, and would seem to be a natural outcome of the preoccupation with measuring that derives from standards and testing.

Returning to Ravitch, as a Reaganite, she has maintained a view of school reform measures since her stint as assistant secretary of education that would reasonably be argued as consistent with thinking on the political right. But that has changed over the past 5 years, and rather curiously, she has become anti-NCLB and Race To The Top as well as sympathetic to the plight of teachers under attack. Consequently, and perhaps not unexpectedly, she has come under attack herself, from the very groups who were her intellectual and philosophical comrades-in-arms. 

Her article and the links within it are worthy of a read, whether you agree or not with her position.   

http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/02/20/ravitch.teachers.blamed/index.html

In particular, the link to the Newsweek editorial on firing so-called "bad" teachers is also worth a few moments.