Ravitch: Test scores reflect student work, not teacher quality
Diane Ravitch, education historian, author and New York University professor, received an honorary degree from Siena College during its commencement May 15. Here are her remarks:
When I ask students and faculty at Siena why they came here, they all gave me the same answer, the same word: community. This is a community where people care about one another. That caring and that sense of responsibility are the heart of the Siena experience.
There are many challenges facing our society, and none more critical than in education. In higher education, we see the rise of for-profit universities, which invest their funds not in scholarships but in profits for their investors, and in online universities, which by their nature deny the importance of community. When learning online, there is no human interaction, no discussion, no give and take with fellow students and a knowledgeable professor. And no one knows who answered the questions with a click or who wrote the essay that was submitted.
In K-12 education, there is no challenge more critical than the misguided attempt to judge teachers by the test scores of their students. This is wrong on many counts. Test scores reflect student work, not teacher quality. If students don't come to school regularly, their scores will suffer, but only the teacher will be held accountable. If
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