Diane Ravitch: 'We have been through an era of disastrous attacks on education. The next president must treat teachers with respect.'
'We need to stop using teachers as a scapegoat to excuse our society’s unwillingness to do anything to improve the lives of children' says the academic and author.
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As the United States prepares to elect a new President, leading figures in education have given their views on Barack Obama's legacy and what the next education secretary should focus do.
Previously, Andy Hargreaves, Howard Gardner, Randi Weingarten, Julia Freeland Fisher, have all given their opinions. Now, Diane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University, commentator, and author of books including The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, shares her views.
Diane, what will be the legacy of Race to the Top and Barack Obama’s other education initiatives?
In years to come, when historians look back on the early twenty-first century, they are likely to refer to the “Bush-Obama policies,” because No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top share a similar ideology.
The shared assumptions are that standardized testing is both the best measure of educational progress and the goal of education. The ideology rests on a firm belief in extrinsic rewards and punishments. If children are tested, their test scores are used to identify their rating, as well as the ratings of their teachers, principals, and schools.
Race to the Top required schools across the nation to adopt test-based evaluation and to fire educators and close schools based on test scores. And like NCLB, Race to the Top encouraged the mistaken belief that privately managed charter schools and state takeovers were a successful remedy to low-scoring schools.
Both NCLB and Race to the Top – and the assumptions behind them – were not only ineffectual but demoralizing to educators and major policy failures. They led to many school closures, especially in impoverished communities and communities of color.
These policies failed to recognize that the single most important correlate (or cause) of low scores is poverty, family income.
Many educators were unjustly fired, using flawed measures. At the same time, unregulated charters opened by the thousands, diverting resources from public schools and frequently refusing admission to the children with the greatest needs.
In my view, historians will look on this era as a period of failed mandates, of willful and ignorant Diane Ravitch: 'We have been through an era of disastrous attacks on education. The next president must treat teachers with respect.' | News: