Education Reformers and their obsession with Standardized Testing – Even the NY Times can’t get the story right!
Fellow education blogger Diane Ravitch, the nation’s premier public education advocate, opened the New York Times this morning and noted that even the New York Times has been “snowed” by the Corporate Education Reform Industry and their false narrative that the solution to the challenges facing public education in the United States is to have more standardized testing.
Diane Ravitch writes;
News flash! There is a national test that enables us to compare reading and math scores for every state! It is called NAEP. It reports scores by race, ELLs, poverty, gender, disability status, achievement gaps. This is apparently unknown to the Néw York Times and the Secretary of Education, who has said repeatedly that we need Common Core tests to compare states.The New York Times, America’s newspaper of record, has a story todayabout Massachusetts’ decision to abandon PARCC, even though its State Commissioner Mitchell Chrster is chairman of the board of PARCC. True or Memorex? Time will tell.But the story has a serious problem: the opening sentence.“It has been one of the most stubborn problems in education: With 50 states, 50 standards and 50 tests, how could anyone really know what American students were learning, or how well?”Later the story has this sentence:“The state’s rejection of that test sounded the bell on common assessments, signaling that the future will now look much like theEducation Reformers and their obsession with Standardized Testing - Even the NY Times can’t get the story right! - Wait What?:
