Diane Ravitch, education historian and prominent critic of federal education policy, made time for a wide-ranging 30-minute one-on-one interview with Enterprise reporter Jeff Hudson on Friday morning at Sacramento State University. Here are Ravitch’s thoughts and observations on education policy under President Obama, California Gov. Jerry Brown and other topics, presented in a question-and-answer format.
Q: Give me an overview of the difficult situation that public education now finds itself in because of the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind legislation, and high stakes testing of students.
A: My view as an education historian is that NCLB has been a disaster. We’ve had 10 years of it, we’ve seen our schools transformed into test-prep factories. There’s a kind of a robotic view of children, that they can be primed to take the test, and that the test is the way to determine if they’re good or their bad, and if their teacher’s good or bad, and if their school should be closed. This wave of mandated testing and of punishment that goes with testing, or bonuses that go with testing, we’ve never seen anything like it in the history of American education. It
