A teacher of Limited English Proficient elementary students in California describes how she put her students through daily timed read-aloud drills to boost their scores on a benchmark assessment of reading rate that her school district required. Corn briefly reviews the rationale behind measuring reading rate as an indicator of fluency. The reason her school district gave for emphasizing speed was that increasing students' reading rate would improve their scores on the California Standardized Test. Corn's school was in its fourth year as a school needing improvement under NCLB, threatened with closure if scores didn't rise. But her students' scores on the CST and other tests at year's end revealed that even daily speed reading drills had not helped many students meet the district's benchmark for speed. Worse, they had not helped raise scores on the CST. Corn discusses how the stress on speed had unintended bad consequences. She proposes a more balanced assessment of fluency. (Contains 1 endnote.)