Diane Ravitch Quotes
Testing is not a substitute for curriculum and instruction. Good education cannot be achieved by a strategy of testing children, shaming educators, and closing schools.
Ravitch, Diane. Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools. Knopf, 2013, p. 104.
The testing movement that was a part of the so called educational reform of the George W. Bush Administration’s educational reform program that also had bipartisan support also had unintended consequences which some however predicted. Curricula changes and music, art, home economics, civics, physical education tended to get deemphasized or dropped as all schools were focused on was the test performance; school economic and ethnic segregation became worse as publicly available test scores by school and district tended to persuade parents who could afford alternatives (including moving) would avoid poor testing schools. By conditioning school funds and teacher salaries on test performance, teachers tended to avoid the poorer testing schools in favor of those with students who would score well. Perhaps worst of all cheating was rampant, where teachers and school administrators would change test scores or get teachers the tests just before they were administered. School systems misclassified poor testing students as having mental or learning deficiencies so they would not bring the average down. Some states and large school systems, would encourage poor testing students to drop out of school so they would not bring down the average.
Diane Silvers Ravitch is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, she was a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education. In 2010, she became "an activist on behalf of public schools". Her blog at DianeRavitch.net has received more than 36 million page views since she began blogging in 2012. Ravitch writes for the New York Review of Books.
