Ravitch Denounces Reformers For Insisting on 100% Proficiency, Failing to Insist on 100% Proficiency
The problem with constructing a public persona dedicated to arguing that your opponents are always wrong is that you end up contradicting yourself a lot. For example:
TEN years ago, Congress adopted the No Child Left Behind legislation, mandating that all students must be proficient in reading or mathematics by 2014 or their school would be punished…Educators know that 100 percent proficiency is impossible, given the enormous variation among students and the impact of family income on academic performance. Nevertheless, some politicians believe that the right combination of incentives and punishments will produce dramatic improvement. Anyone who objects to this utopian mandate, they maintain, is just making an excuse for low expectations and bad teachers.
So, politicians who insist on 100% proficiency are bad people and indeed the whole concept of judging a school based on the percentage of students who pass a test is morally bankrupt. Okay. Except, here we are two paragraphs later: