Last in a Series: Diane Ravitch on NCLB
This is the last in my series on Diane Ravitch. I have been blogging about her recent article from the August/September issue of neatoday magazine. In her article, “Stop the Madness”, she explains why she no longer supports NCLB, and she ends her article discussing how we can improve our schools.
According to Ms. Ravitch, “We must first of all have a vision of what good education is.” We should be asking what constitutes a well-educated person, what we want students to learn before they graduate, what we want them to accomplish, and why we educate students. In other words, we need to agree on what education is, what it looks like, and why we want to be a part of it as teachers.
Second, she says we need to look beyond reading and mathematics and decide what other qualities are synonymous with a well-educated, well-rounded student. We want to turn out students who are able to think for themselves, have good character, are able to make good decisions, have courage and humor, and who treat others with compassion and fairness. And we need to teach students to be responsible citizens who make educated decisions by rationally studying different points of view.
Finally, she states that we need to send out academically well-rounded students who are able to use both math and science to understand and solve real problems in their communities and in their world and who can also appreciate and participate in their artistic and cultural heritage. In other words, we need students who participate in significant ways, who enjoy the world around them, and who are willing and able to work to improve it. We need to teach them about the world in which they live and help them to find their niche within it.
What kind of test could ever adequately measure these truly important things? There is no such test because the true test of these qualities is life and the purposeful living of it. As Diane Ravitch states, “If these are our goals, the current narrow, utilitarian focus of our national testing regime is not sufficient to reach any of them. Indeed, to the extent that we make the testing regime our master, we may see our true goals recede farther and farther into the distance.” She concludes by stating that, if we continue on this current path, we are likely to produce a generation who equate learning with the drudgery of “worksheets, test preparation, and test-taking”.
In her final plea to turn the current tide by doing away with NCLB in the hopes of saving our public schools, Ms. Ravitch wraps up with this eloquent, heart-felt statement: “As we seek to reform our schools, we must take care to do no harm. In fact, we must take care to make our public schools once again the pride of our nation. To the extent that we strengthen them, we strengthen our democracy.”
(Diane Ravitch’s article was based on her book entitled The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education,)
Educational Reform, High Caliber Schools, No Child Left Behind, Teacher-World's Blog, state achievement tests