Standardized-test scores can provide useful information about how students are doing. But as soon as the scores are tied to firing staff, giving bonuses, and closing schools, the measures become the goal of education, rather than an indicator.
So now come President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan with their Race to the Top program. The administration invited the states to compete for $4.3 billion in a time of fiscal distress. To qualify, states had to agree to evaluate teachers by student test scores, to award bonuses to teachers based on student scores, to permit more privately managed charter schools, and to “turn around” low-performing schools by such methods as firing the staffs and closing the schools.
Race to the Top went even beyond NCLB in its reliance on test scores as the ultimate measure of educational quality. It asserts that teachers alone—not students or families or economic status—are wholly responsible for whether test scores go up or down. Now teachers rightly feel scape-goated for conditions that are often beyond their control. They know that if students don’t come to school regularly, if they are chronically ill, if they are homeless or hungry, their test scores will suffer. But teachers alone are accountable.
The Obama agenda for testing, accountability, and choice bears an uncanny resemblance to the Republican agenda of the past 30 years, but with one significant difference. Republicans have traditionally been wary of federal control of the schools. Duncan, however, relishes the opportunity to promote his policies with the financial heft of the federal government.
The confluence between the Obama agenda and the Republican agenda became clear in the fall of 2009, when Duncan traveled the country with Newt Gingrich to promote Race to the Top. And on March 5 of this year, President Obama flew to Florida to celebrate the test-score gains at a high school in Miami with former governor Jeb Bush, one of the nation’s most vocal proponents of conservative approaches to education reform.
In his recent State of the Union address, Obama rightly asserted that we must encourage innovation, imagination, and creativity so we can “win the future.” But the federal government’s emphasis on standardized tests subverts that lofty goal. Drilling children on how to take tests discourages innovation and creativity, punishes divergent thinking, and prioritizes skills over knowledge. And the endless hours devoted to test preparation certainly deaden students’ interest in school.
Emboldened by the Obama administration, as well as by hundreds of millions of dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, many districts and states now plan to use test scores to evaluate teachers. Most of our nation’s leading testing experts think this is a risky path.
Teachers see these measures as an attack on their profession. Recently elected governors such as Scott Walker in Wisconsin and John Kasich in Ohio are ratcheting up the attack, pushing hard to end teachers’ collective-bargaining rights, while Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York City, Gov. Chris Christie in New Jersey, and Gov. Rick Scott in Florida would like to eliminate seniority and due-process rights for teachers. Destroying the unions will silence the only organized voice that opposes draconian cuts to education budgets. Without that voice, schools can expect larger class sizes and reduced funding for the arts, school nurses, libraries, and other programs.
Many of our nation’s top teachers—some with National Board Certification—are so disgusted by the attacks on public education that they are planning a march on Washington in July. They plan to demand equitable funding for all public schools, an end to using test scores to punish schools and teachers, and involvement of parents and teachers in the decisions that affect their schools.
The only question is whether President Obama, Secretary Duncan, and Congress will hear their message about what’s best for our children—and best for our country.
Ravitch is a historian and author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
It is interesting to me that the very people who are running our country and the businesses of today, can not see the value of what their teachers gave them. Further, they are making it so the children of today and the business owners of tomorrow are so severely undereducated that there will not just be an educational collapse, but an economic one as well!! Can no one see the implications of raising standards to an unrealistic goal so that people make lying, stealing, and cheating a norm?
Who thinks it's a good idea to mandate students who can/will never be proficient due to learning disabilities (which teachers, parents and doctors can't stop) to proficiency? Did no one question that there will be immigrant students in 2014 and they are likely NOT to be proficient since they just got here?
In all truthfulness, the moment that we decided that all students needed to go to college we just increased the stakes that more students would actually fail. And when we stopped teaching skills and started teaching to tests we've managed to make even the smart kids dumb. Kids can not solve problems. When all of the kids in HS's around the nation start heading out to college, who is going to fix our cars, or our plumbing? These skills are needed too, and you don't need college to get them. The college track isn't for everyone, and it's time that we remember to encourage kids to master skills and to be educated citizens. It will be then that the success of our students and our nation's future can start to recover.
Obama must like CHINA very much,even its federal polices imitate chinese polices.
It is amazing that people who make comments do not know the whole story. Diane at least knows part of it. Charter schools do not solve all the problems. Some are corrupt as in cheating to establish a perception of quality. The NCLB, is a noble concept, but unrealistic. Do you comprehend that all students MUST be proficient by 2014? Do you understand the idiocracy behind that? Do you understand that everyone is going to be a lawyer, doctor, or an accountant? Have you visited a school where poverty is high, truancy is a norm that now requires some kids to wear ankle braclet to trace where they are, learning disability growing, kids moving place to place on a regular basis. I'm not talking from outside, I'm talking from a person who is in the inside. I'm telling you because there are good public schools, good teachers, good people who are trying, but it is difficult.
Until you understand and stand up to witness, don't lend your 2 cent!
Sorry not a lawyer, doctor, or an accountant, should have been written.
I paid $32.67 for a XBOX 360 and my mom got a 17 inch Toshiba laptop for $94.83 being delivered to our house tomorrow by FedEX. I will never again pay expensive retail prices at stores. I even sold a 46 inch HDTV to my co-worker for $650 and it only cost me $52.78 to get. Here is the website we using to get all this stuff,http://GoWinBids.com
Dr. Ravitch has it exactly right. The Ed-Reform agenda is manipulated by business (read union-busting) interests aimed at stripping money from the last vestiges of the middle class: public sector employees.
Join my Facebook group "Progressive Teachers Against Barack Obama and Arne Duncan."