Below is an excerpt from an NPR Fresh Air interview. Click here to read the story or listen to the whole interview (including an excerpt from Ravitch's book).
Former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch was once an early advocate of No Child Left Behind, school vouchers and charter schools.
In 2005, she wrote, "We should thank President George W. Bush and Congress for passing the No Child Left Behind Act. ... All this attention and focus is paying off for younger students, who are reading and solving mathematics problems better than their parents' generation."
But four years later, Ravitch changed her mind.
"I came to the conclusion ... that No Child Left Behind has turned into a timetable for the destruction of American public education," she tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I had never imagined that the test would someday be turned into a blunt instrument to close schools — or to say whether teachers are good teachers or not — because I always knew children's test scores are far more complicated than the way they're being received today."
1 comment:
AMEN! I know of one GK's school district that told the students to learn cursive writing from home because they were using the alloted time to prepare for "the test". In another one of my GK's districts, the teacher told the students that instead of being introduced to novels, they would use the time to study for "the test". One of the teachers had the kids reading a novel but told them to hide it and not let anyone know or she would be in trouble.
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