damage of "no child left behind" continues

     Last week, on the heels of numerous protests occurring in conjunction with the National Day of Action to Defend Public Education, leading education scholar and former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch - and former longtime advocate of No Child Left Behind, charter schools, standardized testing, and using the free market to improve schools - appeared on DemocracyNow! to speak out against a broken system & introduce her new book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.
     Bush's No Child Left Behind Policy has been wreaking havoc on children's education by creating an environment where teachers are forced to 'teach to the test', dumbing down & narrowing the curriculum rather than giving children a better, well-rounded education that allows for a variety of learning styles and subjects, embracing what learning should look like in the 21st century. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is only furthering the problem. In the recently introduced "Race to the Top", they have forced states, as part of the funding package, to commit to privatizing many public schools, converting them to charter schools. They have also committed states to evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students, and punishing those whose students fail to perform successfully, which is incredibly unfair to the teachers, and spurs many obvious problems. This means more emphasis on test prep and test drills - for tests that are worthless, in my opinion as an educator, in gauging what a child really knows. In fact, the mere idea of measuring or scoring a child's knowledge in such a way is ridiculous and useless. Although I happen to be one of those people who always enjoyed taking tests - it was fun for me, perhaps because it was easy for me. But I also didn't really care what my score was. In a recent move by the Obama administration, it was announced that all of the teachers in a high school in Rhode Island - the only high school, in fact, in a poor urban neighborhood - will be fired at the end of a school year. A crucial question - where do the arts & sciences come into play among all this testing hullaballoo? They don't. Watch the clip & you will hear one of the reasons why.
     Knowledge is Power. I believe that most people who become educators do so out of the desire to empower young minds by arming them with the knowledge they need to be successful in this world. But the system is broken. In fact, I'm confident that the system, modeled after factory operations, was 'broken' in many ways when it began some 150-200 years ago - not designed to create creative, independent thinkers, but efficient cogs of a well-oiled machine. And of course, many of us prevail regardless. But that's a post for another day.