I’m reading Diane Ravitch’s The Life and Death of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Ravitch is America’s foremost education historian. She has been a champion of testing, choice, charter schools, and letting the market forces of the Invisible Hand direct educational policy.
Seeing the lack of results of No Child Left Behind, Ravitch summoned the courage to admit that she was wrong. Big foundations, accountable to no one, have pushed one failure after another. An opinion piece by the New York Sun’s Andrew Wolf writes:
It is not only the foundations that Ms. Ravitch blames for the current crisis: government has also failed in the attempt to reform the schools from above, lacking a clear perspective of how schools work on a day-to-day basis. Thus, the major federal initiative, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), well intentioned as it may have been, ended up damaging the quality of education, not improving it….
Ravitch writes that “Accountability, as written into federal law, was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools. The effort to upend American public education and replace it with something that was market-based began to feel too radical for me.”
Ravitch says:
“Nations like Finland and Japan seek out the best college graduates for teaching positions, prepare them well, pay them well and treat them with respect,” she said. “They make sure that all their students study the arts, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages, the sciences and other subjects. They do this because this is the way to ensure good education. We’re on the wrong track.”
America’s corporations are suffering because many high-school graduates are uneducated. Cramming for standardized tests in math and writing have crowded out subjects like history and art. Business needs well-rounded generalists, not people who only study to ace the test.
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This is not even remotely the worst of it. Florida is, as we speak, on the verge of passing a law that will push “teaching to the standardized test” into a whole new universe:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/no-child-left-behind/florida-senate-approves-awful.html
Unbelievable.