Achievement gaps start before school starts
By Diane Ravitch / The Saturday Evening Post
Published: October 02. 2011 4:00AM PSTIf you read news magazines or watch TV, you might think that American education is in a crisis of historic proportions. The media claim that our future is in peril because our students have low test scores caused by incompetent, lazy teachers.
Don’t believe it. It’s not true.
Yes, our students’ scores on international tests are only average, but our students have never been at the top on those tests; when the first such test was given in 1964, we ranked 12th out of 12. And, yet, the United States continued to prosper.
So maybe standardized tests are not good predictors of future economic success or decline. Perhaps our country has succeeded not because of test scores but because we encouraged something more important than test scores —the freedom to create, innovate, and imagine. Unfortunately, recent educational reforms throw aside that philosophy in favor of an even greater emphasis on test scores.
In 2001 Congress passed No Child Left Behind, which imposed a massive program of school reform based on standardized
