Education Reformer Doesn't Even Get Half Real
Valerie Strauss posted a commentary by Mike Petrilli the other day that made nice toward Diane Ravitch by acknowledging her point that 100 percent testing proficiency is never going to happen as long as substantial numbers of children continue to live in poverty. But like the rest of the blinkered racers to the top, it never seems to occur to Petrilli that he might advocate for something other than a downward adjustment in the proficiency targets, graduation targets, or some other psychometric bow to reality. A big clip from Petrilli:
Try this exercise. This fall, about 1 million very poor children will enroll in kindergarten in the United States. The vast majority of them will live in single-parent families headed by women in their late teens or early twenties. Most of their mothers will have dropped out of high school; most of their fathers are nowhere to be seen. Most live in urban or rural communities hit hard by the recession, places where unemployment, addiction, and violence are all too commonplace.
Still, not everything is bleak. Almost all of these children participated in some form of pre-school
