New in Print
editors@ccgmag.com NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND? NO WAY T
he No Child Left
Behind
Act is a federal law enacted during the presidency of George W. Bush that promises to be the topic of rigorous debate by edu- cators, parents, academics and policy makers and other from here to king- dom come.
The act
touches on the most contro- versial ideas
citizens have about K-12 educational reform—privatization of schools, vouchers, test scores and teacher accountability and incentives. The subsequent consequences impact chil- dren and families – particularly those in large, failing, urban school systems that predominantly serve minority students.
Diane Ravitch’s best-selling book, The Death and Life of the Great Ameri- can School System, seeks to unravel some of the myths about educational reform and NCLB, taking the position that those still advocating for NCLB reforms are jeopardizing the very solutions they are trying to create.
Ironically, Ravitch, a research professor of Education at New York University and a renowned historian of Education, once vigorously touted NCLB within the Bush administra- tion when it passed in 2002. Now the nonresident senior fellow at the think- tank Brookings Institution in Washing- ton rejects the notion of NCLB, par- ticularly the focus on bare-knuckled testing as a way to spark achievement. Ravitch’s book has been at the center
www.blackengineer.com
of much controversy, largely because she dramatically changed her policy positions.
Ravitch’s ap- proach to educa- tional reform comes from a bird’s-eye view. From 1991 to 1993, she was assistant secretary of Education and counselor to the sec- retary of Education in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. Then she served in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations as a member of the National Assessment Governing
Board, which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal testing program.
By 2006, she realized that NCLB simply could not fulfill its mission to improve learning.
She describes an ineffectual and burdensome law that actually proves detrimental to children. For instance, she points out that states actually have lowered their educational stan- dards as a way of meeting the act’s rigid goal of absolute proficiency in 2014.
Ravitch has been persuaded that idealistic support for charter schools has been vastly overblown, and that approach has come at the sacrifice in many cases of public school systems. She now believes that charter schools and the voucher system that supports them, in fact, have been averse to edu- cational best practices and innovation.
Using the New York City school system as her example, she demon- strates her belief that politics infil- trates the educational process when a reliance on test scores is used to
gauge progress. In New York, she claims, charter schools have been allowed to cull off the best students while avoiding those students who are troubled.
Ravitch shows the pitfalls that occur when the nation’s educational system is relegated to private indus- try. Her premise is that the job of educating children belongs to mas- ter teachers and professionals who know curriculum and understand the benefits of a well-rounded educational experience.
And Ravitch doesn’t much care for the knee-jerk closing of schools deemed to be failures as a prescrip- tion for improvement. Schools are neighborhood institutions, she says, that foster values, traditions and consistency in communities, so they need to be preserved. Children and their families depend on these school grounds to bring stability to their lives, she says.
Ravitch returns to an earlier belief that high standards, demanding cur- riculum and respect for teachers will improve the system. While noting the importance of students achieving proficiency in basic skills of reading and mathematics, she postulates that history, the arts, literature, science and foreign languages are just as vital.
Success, according to Ravitch, depends on many factors, but the power of curriculum should not be understated. Schools need to have coherent, sequential and visionary curriculum programs if they are going to meet the needs of students.
Ravitch’s book makes a sterling case for restoring the luster of public education. She is equally as passion- ate in admitting that she misread the ramifications of NCLB and its test-cen- tric principles. She says that instead of fixing education, the evidence suggests that No Child Left Behind has made things worse.
USBE&IT I Deans Edition SPRING 2010 67 by M.V. Greene
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