If you read the news magazines or watch TV, you might get the impression that American education is deep in a crisis of historic proportions. The media tell you that other nations have higher test scores than ours and that they are shooting past us in the race for global competitiveness. The pundits say it’s because our public schools are overrun with incompetent, lazy teachers who can’t be fired and have a soft job for life.
Don’t believe it. It’s not true.
Critics have been complaining about the public schools for the past 60 years. In the 1950s, they said that the public schools were failing, Johnny couldn’t read, and the schools were in a downward spiral. In the 1960s, we were told there was a “crisis in the classroom.” For at least the past half-century we have heard the same complaints again and again. Yes, our students’ scores on international tests are only average, but when the first such test was given in 1964, we were 12th out of 12. Our students have never been at the top on those tests.
The critics today would have us believe that our future is in peril because other nations have higher test scores. They said the same thing in 1957 when the Soviet Union sent its Sputnik into orbit and “beat us” by being first. At the time, the media were filled with dire predictions and blamed our public schools for losing the space race. But we’re still here, and the Soviet Union is gone.
Maybe those tests are not good predictors of future economic success or decline. Is it possible that we succeeded not because of test scores but because our society encourages something more important than test scores: the freedom to create, innovate, imagine, and think differently?
We should, as President Obama said in his 2011 State of the Union address, ignore the naysayers because “America still has the largest, most prosperous economy in the world. No workers are more productive than ours. No country has more successful companies or grants more patents to inventors and entrepreneurs. We are home to the world’s best colleges and universities where more students come to study than any other place on Earth.”
Since the 1840s, our public schools have been a bulwark of our democratic society. Over time, they have opened their doors to every student in the community regardless of that student’s race, religion, language, disability, economic standing, or origin. No one has to enter a lottery to gain admission.
With this openness, there is a price to be paid: Our public school teachers have one of the most difficult jobs in society. Their classes include children who are recent immigrants, many of whom don’t speak or read English; they include children who have social, emotional, mental, and physical disabilities; they include children who live in desperate poverty.
Let’s be fair to our schools and our teachers. As our society has changed, the schools have had to deal with escalating social problems. Compared to schools today, the schools of the 1950s were tranquil. Teachers were uncontested authorities in their classrooms. They were free of the mandates now regularly issued by Congress, the courts, and state legislatures. If students misbehaved or failed repeatedly, they were likely to be suspended or expelled. Only half of the students who started ninth grade eventually graduated high school, and responsibility for their success or failure was shared equally by family and school.
In the mid-20th century, most children lived in two-parent families; today, single-parent families are the norm in many communities, and many children come home to an empty apartment or house. Our popular culture has changed dramatically, too. Television, cell phones, and the Internet have connected children to the outside world, and the outside world often sends messages that contradict parents’ efforts to create sound values and a work ethic.
In the years after World War II, the American economy grew steadily, and there were plenty of good jobs for people who did not have a high school diploma. Now most of those jobs, whether clerical or in manufacturing, have been replaced by new technologies or by outsourcing. Back then, it was no shame to leave school without a diploma. Today, it is expected that everyone must graduate from high school, and anyone who does not is stigmatized socially and economically.
The good old days were not that good if you were black or disabled. Public schools routinely excluded children with disabilities, and schools in many parts of the nation were racially segregated, either by law or by custom.
Our schools are now expected to educate all children, whatever their condition. In 1975, Congress mandated special education for children with disabilities. It promised to pay 40 percent of the cost but has never followed through. When politicians complain about the high cost of education, they fail to acknowledge that most of the new money spent on the schools has gone to pay for services for children with physical, mental, and emotional problems.
Since the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which banned racial segregation in the schools, the basic principle of American education has been equality of educational opportunity. Starting in 1965, Congress passed legislation to send extra resources to districts that enrolled the poorest children—resources that benefited children of all races. Meanwhile, as white and black middle-class families moved to the suburbs, urban districts had school systems characterized by heavy concentrations of students who were both racially segregated and impoverished.
In 2001, after the election of President George W. Bush, Congress passed a law called No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which changed the federal role in education. Instead of seeking equitable funding, Congress decided that it would impose a massive program of school reform based on standardized testing. The new law required states to test every child in reading and math from grades three through eight. The theory behind NCLB was that teachers and schools would try harder and see rapid test score gains if their test results were made public. Instead of sending the vast sums of money that schools needed to make a dent in its goal, Congress simply sent testing mandates to every school. It required that every child in every school must reach proficiency by 2014—or the schools would be subject to sanctions. If a school failed to make progress over five years, it might be closed or privatized or handed over to the state authorities or turned into a charter school. There was no evidence for the efficacy of any of these strategies, but that didn’t matter.
Educators knew that the goal of 100 percent of the students reaching proficiency was wildly unrealistic, but no one asked their opinion. So they kept their mouths shut. Over the past decade, districts and states have committed billions of dollars to testing, test preparation materials, and data systems. The results have been meager. Test scores have gone up in some districts and states, but federal audit tests do not reflect the same rate of improvement. That’s because most state tests have lower standards than the federal tests, and some states have since lowered their standards in an effort to show the kind of improvement the federal government has mandated.
Setting an impossible goal, providing inadequate resources to pursue that goal, and then firing educators and closing schools for failing to reach it is cruel and unusual punishment.
In 2009, the Obama administration launched its own radical school reform plan called Race to the Top. In some ways, it is worse than NCLB. Like NCLB, it assumes that higher test scores mean better education, even when those scores have been purchased by intensive test-prep activities. (What’s misleading about this kind of gain is that aggressive test-prep activities may lift scores without improving students’ knowledge or skills. In fact, some districts have seen scores and graduation rates rise while college remediation rates remained the same.) More than NCLB, Race to the Top blames teachers if student test scores don’t go up, which has demoralized millions of teachers. The program dangled nearly $5 billion in front of cash-hungry states, which could become eligible only if they agreed to open more privately managed charter schools, to evaluate their teachers by student test scores, to offer bonuses to teachers if their students got higher test scores, and to fire the staff and close schools that didn’t make progress.
Again, not one of these policies—not one—has any consistent body of evidence behind it. The fundamental belief that carrots and sticks will improve education is a leap of faith, an ideology to which its adherents cling despite evidence to the contrary.
Charter schools on average do not produce better academic results than regular public schools. As charters proliferate, regular public schools lose students and funding, and many charters try to avoid the students who are most costly and difficult to educate. Merit pay has failed again and again. Most testing experts agree that it’s wrong to judge teacher quality by students’ test scores. The promise of Race to the Top is that billions more will be spent on more tests, and districts will reduce the time available for subjects (like the arts and foreign languages) that aren’t tested. Piece by piece, our entire public education system is being redesigned in the service of increasing scores on standardized tests of basic skills. That’s not good policy, and it won’t improve education. Twelve years of rewarding children for picking the right answer on multiple-choice tests is bad education. It will penalize the creativity, innovativeness, and imaginativeness that has made this country great.
What the federal efforts of the past decade or more ignore is that the root cause of low academic achievement is poverty, not “bad” teachers. Children who are homeless, in ill health, or living in squalid quarters are more likely to miss school and less likely to have home support for their schoolwork. The most important educators in children’s lives are their families. What families provide in the way of encouragement, experiences, expectations, and security has a decisive effect on a child’s life chances. The most consistent predictor of test scores is family income. Children who grow up in economically secure homes are more likely to arrive in school ready to learn than those who lack the basic necessities of life.
Of course, no school should have any bad teachers. But bear in mind that administrators usually have three to four years to decide whether to grant due process rights (often called “tenure”) to teachers. In the years before a teacher gets due process rights, the teacher may be fired without any reason or cause at all. After a teacher wins due process rights, it doesn’t mean life tenure—it means that teachers have the right to a hearing before they may be fired. Teachers don’t hire themselves, don’t evaluate themselves, and don’t grant themselves due process rights. If there are bad teachers, we should ask why administrators are not doing their jobs, and the district should demand speedy resolution of any charges against teachers.
Most of what is called school reform these days consists of privatization and de-professionalization. The charter industry is growing rapidly and competing with regular public schools; it has ample resources to air television commercials and print ads to attract new “customers.” This competition has not proceeded on a level playing field because the charters frequently have smaller proportions of English-language learners and children with disabilities than the neighboring public schools. In addition, many charters are subsidized by additional millions of dollars in private donations, which enables them to market their wares and provide services that regular public schools cannot afford such as tutoring and mandatory summer school.
Some conservative governors—such as Mitch Daniels in Indiana, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania—have taken privatization to the next level and are pushing voucher programs, which will send public dollars to private and sectarian schools, possibly even to home-schoolers. This will divert many millions of dollars from the regular public schools.
At the same time, some states are lowering the standards for entry into teaching, ironically under the banner of improving teacher quality. Some, such as New Jersey, are proposing to remove certification as a requirement for teaching; others, such as Florida, are removing any stipends for experience. In Texas, a person can become a teacher by taking courses online. Still other states seek to make it easier for novices to become not only teachers, but also principals and superintendents.
Two major reports were released in spring 2011 that showed what a risky and foolish path the United States has embarked upon. The National Research Council (NRC) gathered some of the nation’s leading education experts, who concluded that incentives based on tests hadn’t worked.
In other words, the immense investment in testing over recent decades, the NRC commission said, were based on intuition, not on evidence—and faulty intuition, at that. The other report, by the National Center on Education and the Economy, maintained that the approach we are now following—testing every child every year and grading teachers by their students’ scores—is not found in any of the world’s top-performing nations.
It’s important to remember that this is not simply an abstract matter for ivory tower policy wonks to be nattering over. Our present course endangers one of our nation’s most precious institutions: our public schools. Surely they need improvement, but they don’t need a wrecking ball. Our policymakers’ obsession with standardized testing has proven to be wrong; not only does it lack scientific validation, but any parent or teacher could have told the policymakers that a heavy reliance on multiple-choice tests crushes originality, innovation, and creativity. As the federal government ratchets up the stakes attached to the tests, they become an even greater burden on students, teachers, and the quality of education. In addition, the higher the stakes, the less reliable the tests become as measures of learning. When everything rides on test scores, schools will encourage “teaching to the test” and even cheat to avoid being closed.
We are now at a fork in the road. If we continue on our present path of privatization and unproven market reforms, we will witness the explosive growth of a for-profit education industry and of education entrepreneurs receiving high salaries to manage nonprofit enterprises. The free market loves competition, but competition produces winners and losers, not equality of educational opportunity. We will turn teachers into “at will” employees, not professionals, who can be fired at the whim of a principal based on little more than test scores. Their pay and benefits will also depend on the scores. Who will want to teach? Most new teachers already leave the job within five years—and that figure is even higher in low-income districts.
What we will lose, if we move in that direction, is public education. Just as every neighborhood should have a good police station and firehouse, every neighborhood should also have a good public school.
If we are serious about closing the achievement gap, we should make sure that every pregnant woman who is poor has good prenatal care and nutrition and that every child has high-quality early education before arriving in kindergarten. The achievement gap begins before the first day of school. If we mean to provide equality of educational opportunity, we must begin to level the playing field before the start of formal schooling. Otherwise, we will just be playing an eternal game of catch-up—and we cannot win that game.
It is worth remembering that the reason we first established public education was to advance the common good of the community. It began in small towns, where communities agreed that all the children should be educated for the good of all and the sake of the future. Public schools have a civic mission: They are expected to prepare young people to become citizens and to share in the responsibility of maintaining our society. As political forces tear them apart, creating opportunities for entrepreneurs and for profit, it diminishes our commonwealth. That is a price we must not pay.
Diane Ravitch is a historian of education and a professor at NYU. She’s the former U.S. assistant secretary of education. Click here for a comment on this article by our Publisher, Joan SerVaas.
More on education in America:
Online Testing Doesn’t Work
When it comes to exams, this high schooler wants to stick with good old-fashioned pencil and paper. Read more >>
Teaching to the Test Gets an ‘F’
A conversation with Sir Ken Robinson, a leading thinker in the field of education and human potential. Read more >>
The Problem with Testing
Your child is more than a score. Here’s what one parent and researcher learned about the standardized assessments administered to students, teachers, and schools.
Read more >>
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Comments
My name is Peyton Fleming. I am an undergraduate student at The College of Idaho in Caldwell, ID. As a double major across the bridges of STEM and The Fine Arts (Mathematics-Physics and Music Education for Choral Activities) I find this argument beyond compelling and really a big bite to swallow. I appreciate the claim on which this stands, the idea that these standardized tests are hindering creativity and innovation for upcoming members of this society. To give some perspective, I am a performer myself and if I may say, it is near impossible to be a musician that is fundamentally sound and textbook when the elements of creativity and imagination are missing. No one is interested in having hundreds of thousands of copies of the same performance, people want change and excitement. They want to hear who can interpret and take a score/piece of music to that place where it can move people and influence their lives and thinking. What about this idea of being “textbook” and “proficient” is anything different, and why are we teaching these children that it’s just fine to be smart in these categories? “You have to be good at math and be able to read to be successful, nothing else matters.” This statement is absurd! As a future educator, I want to hear what you think about the approach to delineating this so-called tradition of schooling, and how creative ways of thinking, critical analysis and overall innovation can be reinstated in the public system? I hope this finds you well in these times of crisis, and that I get the opportunity to discuss this with you. Thank you for reading.
I think the article that Diane Ravitch wrote was accurate. The United States of America has never been academically superior, so I don’t believe there’s a crisis about how to “beat” other nations. However, the crisis with the Unite States’ education is that people are pinning the blame on the school itself and the teachers, who are already pressured enough with the students and low pay. As Ravitch said, children should receive education before reaching kindergarten. I believe putting a child in pre-school, or any other form of early education, would help advance the next generations to come.
However, an equal oppurunity for all to be able to achieve and be involved in that sort of education is important. Education is to “advance the common good for the community” and it should never be limited to those with a lot more money than those who only make an “average” or “low” amount of pay.
Excellent article! As a educator for the past 20 years, I have seen the destructive force NCLB has had on our educational system. In my opinion, the generation that was “educated” during the period starting in 2001 until now should ask for their “money” back. Motivation is the key to all learning and NCLB and RTTT do not address this critical element. In fact, both under funded federal mandates seem to totally ignore the important role student motivation has on learning.
When I first understood the content and ramifications of NCLB, I was deeply concerned. To me it looked like an attempt to reinforce the advancement of charter schools, vouchers and privatization by making all public schools look like “failures” by 2014. The goal of 100% proficiency was clearly Utopian and seemed only to serve the interests of those who wished to politicize education. In the final analysis, while NCLB’s stated mission was to leave no child behind, its actual consequence was a generation left behind.
What if Charter Schools Bring new resources into the current system???
I sympathize with many of the arguments made in this article, but am still left with a question: Suppose that we can agree that the current system has problems that need to be fixed. And that among these problems are 1) a lack of funding, and 2) a lack of an ability to attract and retain ENOUGH Top Talent that wants to be public school teachers, particularly in Inner Cities. Now assume that the a Charter school comes into existence in an inner city neighborhood. That this charter school, 1) is a non-profit entity, and 2) that it does not cherry pick students, but rather provides free education to a randomly selected sample that mirrors the population in the surrounding neighborhood. Ok now assume that this charter school by its existence is able to attract Money from wealthy philanthropists, and talented, highly motivated teachers, and that neither the money or the talented teachers would have gone to the existing public school system but rather are incremental resources that come into the system as a result of the charter school’s existence. Given this lengthly list of assumptions: Why is the existence of the Charter School bad for Public Education in America? I would love to hear Diane Ravitch’s, and other’s perspective on that.
What if it’s not the educational system at all?
Curiosity and the excitement of discovery. It grows from infancy, fed by family members who answer endless questions and endlessly teach correct pronunciation, grammar, thinking and social skills, and spark more curiosity.
Warehousing children from infancy through their most formative years forces them to abandon curiosity in order to survive the bullying and unhealthy competition of the warehoused mob. To me this seems to be the basis of our education problem. We get them when their curiosity is already broken. Seldom do we get to see the light of discovery dawn from a face.
The worst of it is that the bigger and better stuff that we get with the money that we earn by shunting the kids off to the lowest bidder, is also broken.
A child lasts forever. Stuff is just stuff.
I appreciate your article Ms. Ravitch. It seems you are one of many who “get it”. As a veteren school teacher, I am close to throwing in the towel. It is so hard to fight all these pundits who claim to be reforming education when in fact they are destroying it. When oh when will anyone actually ask classroom teachers for the information they need to make any reforms if any are needed? The only reforms I know of are poverty and then child rearing as a true responsibility. Now these are not school teachers’ responsibilities, but they are basic human needs of love and security that if not met, the child cannot learn. Start here and we will see great improvements. Moms and Dads quit paving the roads for your children as this is just as bad as having no input in their education. Hold the learner ultimately responsible.
Another fix is principals do your jobs and get the loafers out of the classrooms.
Teachers are teaching and many kids are learning but if we do not recognize that schools need money and attention to the physical plant as well as the academic needs like books, we are all lost. Stop yelling about the money being spent- it is not enough. Invest and there will be returns but a few dollars and expecting great returns is not going to happen. Put your money where your mouths are and stop looking for scapegoats.
Sign me,
Sick and tired of not being heard in Tennessee.
The article correctly states that, “When everything rides on test scores, schools will encourage ‘teaching to the test’ and even cheat to avoid being closed.”
In what industry is it ever acceptable to blame incentives for corruption? If our public school system cannot do the right thing, it has only itself to blame. Those who run the public school system are responsible for the public school system.
Ethics don’t get much simpler than this.
Diane Ravitch is a fine educational historian, and was the assistant secretary of education under the George H.W. Bush administration, and was, to some degree, an architect of NCLB. She revisited her research later and found NCLB to be very destructive (more like ECLB). She wrote a book lately, The Death and Life of the Great American Education System, that describes her current thinking. It’s good reading! I hope she can keep on speaking out about her conclusions!
Privatized systems in other countries (England primarily) can be described in other literature—George Orwell wrote The Clergyman’s Daughter in which a portion describes the dismal educational experiences of children in a private girls’ school and the young teacher’s efforts to do better. (He indicated in the book that the public schools in England were intended for the children of families that “were on the dole” and that any families with any middle class aspirations sent their children to private schools, often run by charlatans, without regard to the quality of the educational program offered).
Frank McCourt wrote Teacher Man but no one seems to wonder how it was that this great author was an especially bad teacher in some vocational high schools in New York but suddenly became a wonderful teacher in more affluent prep schools after he was more or less accidentally hired in more up-town schools.
I don’t see any exit from this current condition of thoughtless, market-driven “reform” madness. I would say to any young person that I care about, “DO NOT GET INTO EDUCATION AS A CAREER!” (There may be some hope, though, for the future, if Diane Ravitch is able to express herself and find receptive audiences in the ranks of policy-makers and the general population).
I know time is tight but it’s good to read. Literature, research, and history can still inform us if we are willing to listen or read. Otherwise, we are left with words to make the gut churn one way or another according to the designs of nefarious ideologues rather than nurturing intelligent discussion and making the mind work.
Awesome! Kudos to Diane Ravitch for speaking the truth about American Public Education! Problem is no one, and I mean no one in the Republican Party cares to listen to one of their own. They see Diane as traitor to the cause of destroying the American education system, which is what NCLB was designed to do. It has northing to do with educating our kids. It was designed to destroy the NEA, and with it public schools to the Republicans could “privatize” our schools. Better yet, maybe outsource our schools to India or Pakistan, where $8 billion went to build their infrastructure. How many schools, and textbooks could that but in the good ‘ole USA? Thank you Diane for speaking not only the truth, but the facts. Interested in running for President?
Diane Ravitch said everything! No longer are teachers afforded the time to instill a love of learning. And in a state that was “awarded” Race To The Top Funds, teachers are about to sink to the bottom under the new assessment platform. It’s sad that I spent 8 hours working on a lesson plan for an “announced 15 minute walk-through.” On a scale from 1-5, I’m a “rock-solid” 3! I’ve been teaching 13 years, been Teacher of the Year for my County, have a BS, MS, and an EdS, been a State trained Mentoring teacher, a Curriculum and Instruction Coach, have hosted numerous student teachers, and I’m a 3….feeling a bit deflated. Perhaps I should have spent more time preparing….
“Is it possible that we succeeded not because of test scores but because our society encourages something more important than test scores: to create, innovate, imagine, and think differently?”
This is the question future educators need to be constantly asking and reminding ourselves. Teachers need to start departing from the Industrial Age teaching methods, where students memorize random facts, listen to monotonous lectures, and are treated all the same. We currently live in the Age of Technology, where ingenuity, creativity, and individuality thrive. Therefore, our public schools need to promote and foster this within our students.
Standardized tests with multiple choice questions about selective information hinder this creativity and innovativeness. Public schools need to revolutionize their methods of measuring knowledge in a way that students can critically think and discover more about their world. Teachers should be preparing and equipping students with the skills to survive socially, economically, and physically in the real world. “Teaching to the test” should become “teaching for life.”
Until public schools not start doing this, then I agree with Ravitch, our American schools are in crisis.
Brown v. Board of Education was strictly a desegregation order, aimed at ending the hypocrisy of “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites, schools which were grossly unequal and which assured discrimination against black children. Brown v Bd of Ed DID NOT establish ” . . . the basic principle . . . of equality of educational opportunity” in American public education as stated by the author.
“Staying in School” a recent study given in NYC, gives evidence that students that have engaged in arts education classes within the school day have a higher percentage of graduation. Another study, “Critical Evidence”, gives evidence that arts education helps students do better in their other subjects. These are important and our school policy-makers, legislators and teacher preparation schools should make some dramatic changes, including integrating the arts and providing equal access for all students. Arts Education teaching infuses skills everyday in classroom tasks. Among them…collaboration, self-direction, critical problem solving, flexibility, innovation and creativity. Skills needs no matter what career a students selects. Read Sir Kenneth Robinson’s: Out of Our Minds, Learning to be Creative to see how education should be changed to reflect this. Lastly, I want to add my own two cents. After teaching, supervising, reading and writing about arts education for a life-time, in spite of the above evidence; the arts can stand on their own. Read Eliott Eisner. I feel the arts make meaning out of life and give life meaning. They make us human and humane. Tragical, they have not been recognized for what they do to prepare us for life and many students who have the potential for success by studying the arts are forever lost because we have not provided for them in the school day. There should not be a hierachy of importance or place in a school day for what skills our students possess. We need to open worlds for students, not close them. Arts Education is one important answer to an authentic education and it has not been allowed to even begin to flourish. Share these studies with parents, administrators and legislators. The students of today and our country cannot afford the status quo.
As I enter into my senior year education classes, this article seems to be particularly relevant to me and my upcoming future as a teacher. Throughout the course of my professional education, my professors have made a point of lecturing about the details of NCLB and the various aspects that go along with it. Never fail, every class discussion always reverts to the pitfalls of the program: how teaching to a test stifles creativity, how effective teaching is reflected in so many ways other than test scores.
I believe this article speaks to many of these fears, fears that are plaguing teachers, both future and present. Ravitch makes her greatest point in the article when she states ‘Just as every neighborhood should have a good police station and firehouse, every neighborhood should also have a good public school.”
The responses to this article saddened me. Ms. Ravitch’s piece, replete with unsupported statements and emotional distraction, denies facts so obvious and pervasive that one would have to have a strong, emotionally-based, personal reason to engage in her delusion. Teachers, please wake up. The system is crumbling. Charters and homeschools are taking over. The emporer is wearing no clothes.
Thank you for this article. I am a post-baccalaureate student seeking my English certification in a university in Pennsylvania. I am excited to get in the classroom and put all of the information I’ve assimilated to use with my future students. That being said, I’m horrified to think that I’ll be expected to teach to some ridiculous test that has no real merit in evaluating knowledge. I’m learning how to teach students to think critically, problem solve, and learn how to collaborate in communities. Blanket testing to measure education is the antithesis to the innovative ideas being embedded in my teaching repertoire. I can only hope that I will be part of the movement to end NCLB.
It should also be noted that standardized tests cost taxpayers millions – round after round of printed tests cost states and school districts a fortune! The publishishing companies who make those tests are on the stock market, so anyone who wants to gain from their investment in the stock market should, therefore, sing the praises of public schools’ successes based solely on test scores. You really don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that connection.
First off, I loved this article. I am a senior in college and I am so excited to graduate and find a teaching job, but I see the way teachers are struggling against these “teach to the test” programs. It is really hard for me because I sit in my education classes and see how successful students can be when we help them to critically think and innovate and I know that these tests are not supporting either. It makes me sad to see the creativity of our students being squandered.
I really hope people see that the programs and test are not accurately measuring student success or teacher quality. If not, it scares me to think of what our schools will become.
I just can’t help but wonder what this means for our future teachers, but more importantly for future students. While we play this “eternal game of catch-up” we’re simply digging ourselves deeper into the hole of the educational gap. We pride ourselves so often on having a place of equal opportunity but how equal is it when those in poverty are entering the school system on a completely different level? Good teaching must be for the benefit of all students. How can teachers expect to teach individual students when everything has become a “standardized test.” We’re teaching to the tests, and where is the learning taking place?
Schools have been in a “crisis” since the time I began teaching. I know. I’ve read about it in the news, peer-reviewed articles, and seen it publicized daily! I went to school in the 50’s and trust me they were not the pentacle of the “good days of education”. You just did not hear about it daily. I began teaching inner-city in the 70’s and continued there until 2010. I gained multiple degrees and won many awards, some nationally for my teaching. I retired when I realized that I and my students were no longer having any fun (and learning should be fun because it is also hard work). By 2000 I felt that I was being pimped out by the education bureaucracy. I no longer even believed that what I was asked to teach was important to the growth and knowledge of the students. Nor was I allowed to teach in a manner that supported the growth of the students in my school. Everything had been “standardized” but to whom I do not know. Frustration is rampant when you know your job is important, you love your students (warts and all), you understand how your students think and learn and you are prevented from doing what you know works. It is like being a parent but prevented from disciplining or teaching your child. Is the frustration over education still there for me? Yes. To this day I will not work in a school because it breaks my heart to enter them. I now work in community centers with non-English speaking students and in outdoor settings with students.
Kudos, kudos, kudos to the Saturday Evening Post, to Joan SerVass for inviting Diane Ravitch to write her article in the September/October 2011 issue, and again to Joan SerVaas for her critical, insightful summary of Diane’s article.
I hope that Diane Ravitch’s critique of “No Child Left Behind” and Obama’s “Race to the Top” will reach to members of Congress and the White House. In the midst of the “political partisan current culture” of our congregational scene, this important educational issue will undoubtedly take a back seat, but I am confident there are some who will push the envelope (even if doing so may fly-in-the-face of donor funding to help in re-election to a seat in congress).
Yes, the media has always focused, and still does focus a spotlight on public education for National woes. And, seldom, if ever, is there a spotlight focused on the home (unfortunately an increasingly unstable and scattered home scene) as a large part of the decreasing student success in school.
I hope your publishing of this educational article will be the start of a balooning National discussion, all the way to the floors of the House and Senate.
I cried when I read this article. I have been a public school teacher for 21 years minus 4 years that I taught at a Technical College. Every year breaks my heart. I believe that teaching is a calling that is being compromised by the almighty dollar. Your words so eloquently expressed what I have been feeling for several years. Thank you.
“The free market loves competition, but competition produces winners and losers, not equality of educational opportunity.”
That single sentence provides the best counter-argument to those who claim that privatization and competition is necessary to “save” our public schools. Dr. Ravitch is fulfilling a vital function as she tries to educate the public about the seriously flawed “logic” of today’s education critics.
I taught elementary and junior high school for twenty-seven years. I won some awards and my students generally did well. My Masters degree is in curriculum and instruction, counseling, and adolescent development. I served as a teacher license assessor for the Ohio Department of Education for three years.
In casual conversation is probably okay to talk generally about “standardized tests.” In the context of serious discussion we should recognize the difference between statistically standardized tests and standardized criterion-referenced tests. Once this line is sufficiently blurred, the electorate can be led to inadvertently destroy its education system in pursuit of an illusion educational value.
Theoretically, any test that is given and graded in a carefully controlled manner could be called a standardized test. However, this is an overgeneralization. Someone may want to correct Wikipedia. There are different types of tests used for different educational purposes.
Statistically standardized tests are designed using a “sample” population that is itself selected to be representative of the population the test will be used to evaluate. The test questions, the question order, vocabulary, and other features of these tests are then controlled to be representative. The designers also statistically force the results into a “normal” or bell- shaped curve based on the performance of the “sample” population and the desired features of the test. These tests provide reliable, usually national, percentile rank, and other indexed scores for the tested individuals as well as classrooms and schools that use the test. Statistically standardized tests are designed to provide basic information about both the students’ educational ability and their performance. Because this kind of test is designed to show placement on a normal curve, it is impossible for everyone, or every school, who takes a well-designed statistically standardized test to be “above average.” This kind of test is very difficult to use politically because in order to raise educational standards you would have to increase the difficulty of each of the individual grade level tests every year. For every jurisdiction that improves, or maintains the rising standard, there would also be one that falls behind. To put it another way, for every district that is exceeding expectations, one that a politician could take credit for, there would be another one for which the politician could be criticized for not meeting the educational needs of the community’s students. There is little political capital to be gained unless politicians in general are truly committed to improving the value students receive from their education. This takes time to understand the role of education in the social infrastructure, money they don’t want to invest (spend?), and professional skills that they would have difficulty pretending to have.
Criterion-referenced tests are similar to most of the tests and quizzes given in school and tests that grant professional designations. Criterion-referenced questions are designed to test the students’ mastery of particular educational objectives. Solve this math problem, list fifteen characteristics that mammals share with lizards, write a computer program that balances a checkbook, write an essay that compares your mother to Isaac Newton etc. Since there are specific objectives, every student can be successful. While grading such a test, a skilled teacher can draw at least as much information from the incorrect answers than from the correct ones. This information is used to set intermediate objectives, pace future lessons for the class, and design remediation lessons for small groups and individual students. Used correctly, information from criterion-referenced tests can assure that students achieve everything of which they are capable. Criterion-referenced tests are individually designed to focus on specific objectives. There is significant educational information in the results of such a test. Of the hundreds of teachers I have professionally observed, all but perhaps one potential licensee had mastered these skills in their subject area. Every teacher could use more time to do this better. Criterion-referenced tests are best used at the classroom level. Their collective results can be used by groups of teachers to design curriculum at the school level. Criterion-referenced tests could also be used to objectively assign students to grade levels at the beginning of a school year. This is the basic idea behind SAT and other college entrance testing. While this practice could be a key to improved K – 12 education, I know of no K – 12 schools that do entrance testing to assign grade levels.
Most politically mandated testing programs focus on state-designed criterion-referenced tests. The use of criterion-referenced tests at the state level is almost universally abused. When politicians need to see “progress” or an “educational miracle” the tests are simply changed. Texas comes to my mind – but Texas was perhaps not the beginning and was certainly not the end. Such programs see tests times and testing increased. Objectives are simplified, replaced by less stringent versions, or dropped while “modernizing” the test (that was designed maybe two years ago). Entire subject areas are often eliminated from the standard. The classroom schedule is further adjusted by administrative mandate to make time available to teach “Test taking skills.” Students must correctly identify a number two pencil. The instructional time and materials budget comes from art, music, history, and often core subject areas like science, math, and reading. During testing weeks, and we are truly talking about entire weeks of school, many classrooms are focused almost entirely on either testing, teaching test taking skills, or familiarizing students with upcoming tests using purchased copies of previous years tests. The goal is to get the student to fill in the correct bubbles.
None of the above considers that when politicians set the objectives their political bias is institutionalized in the classroom. Having educational consultants and politically appointed operatives design the tests does not improve the situation. People do what they are paid to do.
Not addressed here is the low quality of many of the state-designed tests – particularly the earlier ones. An unacceptable percentage of questions don’t accurately evaluate their target objective. This is probably a combination of objectives that are not clearly written and lack of funds to test the validity of individual questions in subpopulations in various parts of a state. Question order is yet another concern.
What are the educational effects of where the tests are scheduled during the school year? What are the effects on students’ education when they observe the compounding incentives for schools to cheat – even if their school doesn’t cheat? It might also be entertaining to discuss the feedback loops between corporate campaign contributions and the awarding of testing contracts and educational materials purchases.
As you mentioned on several occasions, “teaching the test” does not help students because not every student learns the same way. I am currently a Freshman in College, and I now see a huge difference in the way we were taught in high school.
Our school encouraged every Junior and Senior and even some Sophomores to take at least one Advanced Placement course. At first I thought this was to encourage students to challenge themselves, but as I was in class with some students new to AP, I saw that this was extremely difficult for them and that they could not keep up with others. It seems that the only reason my school wanted these students to take AP tests is to say that we have a higher percentage enrolled in such classes. This is appalling in my opinion because the true purpose of education is to help students learn in their best interest not so the school could get more money.
It is very similar to how Vocational Schools have become an outlet for college-prep students who do not want to attend their town’s public school. This is unfair because the Vocational schools were founded for non college-prep students who wanted to learn a trade and start working out of high school. We need to stop assuming that every child is the same because we are killing the creativity that has made us successful in this society.
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I think we need to seriously reconsider how we are measuring the accountability of public schools in our school districts. NCLB only takes into account the scores received on standardized test. Using only that type of tool gears teachers to direct their major efforts of teaching to produce higher marks on tests. Does that really measure how successful a school actually is? Where are the programs of education to actually help students with skills and knowledge(cosmetology, nursing,chefs, welding,mechanics, car repair, etc.) to be employable once they graduate? A different measurement of success for schools could be the data that includes how many students actually become employed after they graduate. Attaining a college education is truly a very desirable goal but not to the extent that we cheat our students of developing skills that can allow them the ability to be a marketable person in an environment that needs skilled labor .
This article raises a very important point on our children’s education system. My daughter, despite being a straight A student, hates school and homework. If children do not like learning they will not retain any information of the things they have learned. Another important point raised is the problem of standardized testing. My daughter has told me that the many problems listed are in fact true. The teachers at her school seldom, if never, teach anything not on the standardized tests. I definitely think that we should start changing our children’s education, so that they’ll actually like it! We don’t want a nation full of zombies, do we?
This is a very powerful article. The facts are all right there for you. It amazes me that the Presidents of our country have done nothing effective to help America. Yes we are still a country that is great in GDP but where is the happiness? Kids are becoming zombies now with all the technology and standardized tests. I see so many young kids that have iphones in 4th grade. Whats the point? It kills me because there are fewer and fewer kids that are able to think on their own. I was in 3rd grade when NCLB came out and I look back and see how little it did for me and my classmates; kids who should have repeated a year, stayed moving and over time they just stopped trying and relied on TA’s to help them. This is a crisis, I have no way of stopping it but I hope someone does. And fast.
I agree totally that we can’t blame everything on educators, who have an incredibly challenging job. However, I disagree with you that our education system is not in crisis. The very fact that it isn’t serving kids the way it should or used to is a problem, and I would rather people recognize a problem and look for ways to solve it rather than think there is no problem. If people (society at large) thinks there is no problem, how will anything – your ideas or those of others – get accomplished to improve it?
Thank you, Diane. Excellent take on what is really happening in American schools. I just retired after 30 years as a special education and general classroom teacher in a public school system. What always troubled me is that schools were labeled as wasteful, when a large portion of every town’s school budget covers special education. Many of our students had physical as well as emotional disabilities. Yet schools received not a dollar from health insurance agencies. Why is that the school department’s expense? Where is the health insurance company’s contribution?
I am a freshman in college and my professor assigned reading this article and the comments as our first assignment. I felt compelled to comment on my own because I noticed that none of the comments were from students.
In high school, my teachers were forced to teach the material that was on the standardized tests because there was no time nor concern by the administration for anything else. For example, we were not required to take history every year because the subject was not (and still is not) on the tests. As a result, myself and my fellow students barely know anything about our own nation’s past, let alone that of other countries.
I had numerous outstanding teachers, but no matter how good a teacher was, I never felt inspired to learn the material because I knew that it was only for the sake of raising the school’s test scores. I have always been a straight-A student, but I remember when learning used to be fun before NCLB. Those who say that learning does not need to be fun are wrong. Although I was able to learn the material regardless, without the passion for learning that I used to have, I did not retain the knowledge. Caring about your learning makes the difference between learning for the sake of a standardized test and learning in order to become wiser. Knowing that your studies have importance beyond just making your school look good automatically creates a better learning environment.
My father is a high school English teacher and my mother is an elementary Special-Ed teacher. Both are faced with the task of making their students perform well on the standardized tests despite their own beliefs of what the students should actually be learning.
I am currently studying to become a teacher, despite my parents’ sensible reasoning that teachers are underpaid and vastly under appreciated. I want to teach because I truly love children and want to make the same impact on their lives that some of my teachers have made on mine. Unfortunately, the current public and political perspective on education is making me question my decision and even causing me to investigate other majors.
I hope that everyone will gain some common sense in seeing that teachers and students are not at fault if a school’s test scores are “insufficient”. Standardized tests limit the knowledge that your children are actually gaining and discouraging them from learning altogether. Please, for the sake of your children, take the time to educate the people around you who blame us and our teachers for a “failing” educational system. Way to go Ravitch!
Pete do your job and stop putting your burdens onto teachers. If you were an effective principal you would minimized the number of bad and incompetent teachers in your school. Sounds familiar?
Camilo: Diane advocates for the professionalism of teaching, however teachers are not treated as such. When doctors misdiagnosis they’re not fired. They don’t receive a bonus for curing someone nor punished when they don’t. When the weatherman/weatherwoman makes a bad prediction they’re not fired. Lawyers and judges send hundreds of innocent victims to prison ever year, guess what they’re not fired either. But when teachers advocate for children and it’s counter to what society, admin, and the popular policy of the day, they are fired, harassed, ridiculed, and more. Due process is necessary in the teaching profession.
Well said Lori K.
Dear “young mommy and student”. Yes, students are a reflection of society. Have you looked at “society” lately? It is a sad situation. Families are separated, broken, non-existent, students are disrespectful, uninterested, and many refuse to be motivated. Survival in many cases is their priority. The home, family, is the basis of initial learning. What the children learn in that situation they bring to the classroom. Teachers do adapt to these many situations. Teachers do change strategies to try to meet the needs of the children in their care. Today, teachers are counselors, nurses, disciplinarians, moderators, dieticians, confidents, etc. besides imparting academic learning. Teachers are many things, but they are not magicians!
Learning can be “fun”, but it is also work! There are many things in life that we MUST DO, even when it isn’t “fun!” Yes, “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy”, but conversely, all fun and no work make Jack an irresponsible boy! Teachers teach for the future, adjust for the present, and hope that their teaching will help develop the citizens for tomorrow.
Ravitch is right on! Every point she made pokes holes in the fallacies that have surrounded public education for at least as long as NCLB has been imposed on children, teachers, and schools. Should we monitor students’ progress? Absolutely. Do high stakes tests and the unending narrowing of our schools’ curricula so that students will do better on an annual multiple choice test qualify as appropriate monitoring of progress? I do not believe so. We need to address pre-natal care, pre-school opportunities for the economically disadvantaged, and re-focus the purpose of education on critical thinking skills, creativity, innovation, teamwork, social skills, and all of the other important skills that we have been forced to squeeze out of the school day in favor of test preparation. It is time to show our teachers respect and to maximize the potential of all children by making the playing field even.
Wow, JenTeacherMom, why are you bashing confused like that?? How do you know that he or she DOESN’T model ethics, etc., for his or her children? How do you know whether or not $50 is a considerable burden to this parent? Do you live in Illinois, and know the kinds of issues and problems that might face Confused? Problems will never, ever be solved as long as we live in our “judging mind.” As long as one suffers, we all suffer. What is happening in education has less to do with bad parents and teachers, and more to do with a society that has decided that a “race to the top” is the cure for all ills. You see, there can only be ONE WINNER… everyone else is left out in the cold.
Carrie T., I agree with all your comments but one; parenting classes. Good parents aren’t taught in a classroom. Good parents were once children who were parented well, who thrived in a loving environment. The bad parents out there aren’t simply result of having bad parenting, but rather the result of a society that’s forgotten how to care for EVERYONE in the community. I’ve seen many so-called “bad parents” in my teaching career, but I attribute that more to the crushing poverty and dire circumstances that surround them more than the desire to be bad parents, or even the inability to be good ones.
I am sad that politicians and authority figures think they can base everything in an educational facility on one test. As a School Social Worker, I have to say no adequate evaluation is ever based on ONE tool. A diagnosis or plan isn’t done that way in any type of business – public or private. How ridiculous. And, at least in Michigan, half the time the tests are re-written because of problems with the tests, so each year the tests are not comparable in terms of measuring change. – Having worked many years outside of schools, and now in schools I must say, working at a school is intense. Everyone is under such pressure to perform and make things happen; regardless of obstacles. Public schools have so many contradictory mandates. It must be safe for everyone, always, but we must educate every student, regardless of how dangerous or needy. We must measure everyone by a test, regardless of a student’s needs or abilities. Did you know that all special education stuents’ test results are included in the the school results? Do businesses evaluate their top performers in the field and their mailroom or custodial crews the same way? I certainly don’t have the answers, but we all must stop blaming and help each other. Schools can not be successful with students if the parents do not come in, tell their children education is important and assist with learning. Personally I don’t know that most parents can be successful with their children without assistance of some kind as well. Let’s all help each other find a way to make the systems work!!
Sorry, I shouldn’t have brought up the AAA to AA downgrade since I’m sure both countries have just recently made changes to their education so that it has not influenced the current workforce and economy.
Is Ms. Ravitch encouraging public preschool or else, how would everyone afford preschool? I had no preschool experience, had to take ESL classes in kindergarten and first grade. From there on, I excelled academically until high school when personal problems took my attention away from school. I think one of the things that need to be provided in a public school is better counseling since not all kids have parents who know how to encourage education the right away (because not all kids are the same…while my friends kept up despite their parents being this way, I resented my parents asking for staight A’s but never showed any appreciation when I did until too late) don’t remember ever seeing counselors until high school and even then, only once a year maybe and they never provided anything helpful to me. They didn’t do much. Not all troubled kids act out so the counselors should have general class sessions teaching stress management, confidence, college prep, etc. I was amazed how big of a role my husband’s high school counselor played in making sure he stayed on track. My public school counselors had no meaning to me.
I do wholeheartedly support her belief that the US has excelled as a nation because it used to encourage more creativity and thinking outside the box. I wish I could remember the name of the article I had just read this year (to.share with all of you) which made a point of China changing its education style to be like ours by encouraging more creativity. And aren’t they now becoming more economically stronger while we have just been downgraded from AAA to AA? I don’t know enough beyond the general impressions about their education system and ours to claim a correlation. However, I like her point that other successful nations do not do this type of standardized testing. I believe there should be some kind of standardized tests to measure progress but not to the point where it monopolizes the teachers and kids’ time.
Back to (the wrong) school – Seth Godin
A hundred and fifty years ago, adults were incensed about child labor. Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults.
Sure, there was some moral outrage at seven-year olds losing fingers and being abused at work, but the economic rationale was paramount. Factory owners insisted that losing child workers would be catastrophic to their industries and fought hard to keep the kids at work–they said they couldn’t afford to hire adults. It wasn’t until 1918 that nationwide compulsory education was in place.
Part of the rationale to sell this major transformation to industrialists was that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn’t a coincidence–it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they’re told.
Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.
Of course, it worked. Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed. But now?
Nobel-prize winning economist Michael Spence makes this really clear: there are tradable jobs (making things that could be made somewhere else, like building cars, designing chairs and answering the phone) and non-tradable jobs (like mowing the lawn or cooking burgers). Is there any question that the first kind of job is worth keeping in our economy?
Alas, Spence reports that from 1990 to 2008, the US economy added only 600,000 tradable jobs.
If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.
Do you see the disconnect here? Every year, we churn out millions of of workers who are trained to do 1925 labor.
The bargain (take kids out of work so we can teach them to become better factory workers) has set us on a race to the bottom. Some argue we ought to become the cheaper, easier country for sourcing cheap, compliant workers who do what they’re told. We will lose that race whether we win it or not. The bottom is not a good place to be, even if you’re capable of getting there.
As we get ready for the 93rd year of universal public education, here’s the question every parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with: Are we going to applaud, push or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable and mediocre factory-workers?
As long as we embrace (or even accept) standardized testing, fear of science, little attempt at teaching leadership and most of all, the bureaucratic imperative to turn education into a factory itself, we’re in big trouble.
The post-industrial revolution is here. Do you care enough to teach your kids to take advantage of it?
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/09/back-to-the-wrong-school.html
Re: Crystal’s comment. “Don’t teachers have to adjust their style of teaching based on the individuals?” There are a few drill and kill or stand and lecture teachers left, but they are rare. Teachers have adjusted radically to the new population of students – relevance, engagement, reteach, enrichment, etc. However, too many students are ill-prepared and almost impossible to engage for more than a few seconds at a time.
I had a parent tell me this week that her son is easily distracted, but that he is a serious skateboarder and knows how to get into the zone when it’s important. It’s not fun to try and fall repeatedly until you master the board, just as it’s not always fun to master multiplication or language. If he can bring this determination into the classroom, he will be successful. Of course, fun is not bad, its just not enough.
If you are studying education, best of luck. We need all the talent we can attract, if the system isn’t taken down by misguided politicians.
I apologized to my student this past week because we as teachers have been forced to teach them how to take a test, rather than teach them how to think critically and independently. Testing is ruining our children.
This is by far the best article I have read about education in the past 10 years. It is so refreshing to see someone of the caliber and background of Ms. Ravitch so eloquently expressing what is really wrong with our schools today. NCLB started a trend in education that can only mean destruction for our public schools. One can only hope that this article is being read and internalized by some of our government decision-makers in the Dept. of Education. I have passed this on to all of my educator friends.
ps. In reference to the comment about “making learning fun”….maybe “fun” isn’t the right word here. Could we agree to say that “learning shouldn’t be painful” ?
HI. I agree with what Diane Ravitch has to say about the wrong-headedness of organizing the public school experience around testing, as well as the inappropriateness of basing school funding decisions and teacher firings on test results. However, I can’t agree with her opposition to allowing tax money to defray the cost of education for parents who want to take responsibility for independently educating their children, or contract with a private school.
Ms. Ravitch complains that “This will divert many millions of dollars from the regular public schools.” Well, yes it will. But it would also COST the public school system many millions of dollars if those of us currently independently educating our kids, or sending them to private schools, exercised our right to send our kids to public school. The public school system can survive the availability of other funded options.
Though we’ve decided to independently educate our kids, I’m happy to fund a public school system. I want a public education system to exist. It seems Ms. Ravitch wants full-on support for public schools from all of us who pay taxes, while expressing an unwillingness to extend support to those of us who prefer alternatives for our kids. and are struggling with the cost of providing them. I’m a “homeschooler” and I support public schools. I would ask those asking for support for public schools to support my choice as well.
Dr Ravitch has written a great piece in which she has summarized brilliantly the problems of the American education system today, and with historical perspective we usually don’t get from any other source. Yet in the heart of her essay lies an assumption that does not seem to be in accordance with what we have been witnessing as the leading policy in the United States. Dr. Ravitch claims that the policy contradicts any scientific evidence and will lead to a society that is more segregated less creative and one who discourages thinking. We have sufficient evidence that this policy design to achieve precisely that. The pro corporate education policies suppose to drill rather then educate, and is a powerful tool to diminish democracy and secure the status quo. The welfare of society ,the children or local communities around this country are the last things policymakers have in mind. The health of our Plutocracy is what been pushed. Otherwise one could not explain the reasons our elected officials investing in failing policies, they ignore success of other countries, and send their children to private schools that do not implement any of the failing policies Dr Ravitch wrote about. Their success is in the fact that while many countries see popular pro democratic movement where unions students and the unemployed petition the government in the street of major cities, US cities’s streets are silent with compliance.
If no child was going to be left behind, why test them to eliminate or cut funds to the lower performing schools? When the funds are cut, aren’t those students whose test results showed that they needed more help going to be left out? It seems that the “no child left behind” and “testing” are two contradictory implementations of delivering education – providing opportunities to learn…
Thank you Diane. I truly wish you were the spokes woman for all teachers…AFT & NEA. Your common sense could educate everyone…especially our teaching force. Everyone needs to understand where we have been before they can understand why we are here. The attacks on Public Education is not about Public Education, it is about destroying all unions and the middle class. If people start to believe what is repeatedly talked or written about, they start to believe the negative. Even the teachers!! We need to keep POSITIVE comments in the press to support our Public Education System. We need to change the negative beliefs and comments to a support for PUBLIC EDUCATION!!
What happens to this country if we lose the Public School system to private hands??!! Get involved….start the conversation in a positive direction!!
Testing does NOT mean educating. Punishing teachers and schools is as nonsensical as punishing doctors and hospitals if 100% of Americans do not have adequate health care, punishing police officers and departments if there is not a 100% reduction in crime, or penalizing firemen and engine companies if there is not a 100% reduction in fire damage.
To reform public education, we do not need more tests and escalating punishments for sub-standard schools. We need, among other things, more equitable appropriation of public funds, implementation of academic programs with a high success record, lowering pupil/teacher ratio for reading and math, and higher pay incentives for seasoned teachers willing to teach in substandard schools. We need to address individual needs of students at the first signs of struggle. (Learning is supposed to be fun and frustration is a red flag that all is not well.) We need reinforced inclusion with special education experts and properly-trained paraprofessionals available for teamwork with classroom teachers. (No more dumping, please!) Universities need to non-judgmentally lend their services to drowning schools, and the personnel at these schools need to interact with and accept the help graciously. We need local and state school boards to investigate more fully the psychological and educational impact of laws and procedures so that the counterproductive ones are discarded (ie– tracking, whole class punishment, and too much nightly homework).
Relevant, effective class management skills need to be established in all teachers so that discipline is relied upon less. Discipline must be based on sound educational and psychological principles. (ie– Negative reinforcement works better than punishment, and, punishment must be immediate to be effective.) There needs to be an intermediary system to handle struggling, misbehaving students who are not responding well. Rather than zero tolerance or suspensions and expulsions, chronically disobedient students are temporarily removed from class sooner. Rather than being awarded unsupervised free time on the streets, they are given structure and academics, as well as whatever they personally need to counteract the root problem (ie–conflict resolution, behavior modification, anger management, drug counseling, coping with stress, depression and anxiety, specialized tutoring, study skills training). Too expensive? One year in prison costs states 3 times more per person than what is spent on educating 1 child for 1 year (Children’s Defense Fund). A structured intermediary system to handle troubled children until they are able to learn with behaving peers, will divert some of our “disposable” youth from a sure path to prison or the morgue. No child is dispensable.
First, know your students. Take some time to learn what makes them tick, what turns them on, what scares them. Get them involved in taking ownership of their learning. Challenge them but support them.
All of that is possible, but it takes time, time not often given if the primary score is how they will do on the test.
And if our emphasis is on tests, they will begin to make the appropriate economic choice, and ask “will this be on the test?” and the excitement of following a learning moment will be lost.
I am in my 17th year of public school teaching. For what it is worth, I have won awards for my teaching from within and without of the schools in which I have taught. They are nice, but mean far less to me than these
.. I have at least 17 of my former students who are now themselves public school teachers.
.. one former student works in our building as a sign language interpreter. We also have a teacher whom I did not have in the classroom but on my yearbooks staff 13 years ago who has something similar to me: I gave up a successful career in data processing to become a teacher, she gave up a successful career as an engineer.
.. the thanks of the parents of students I teach and have taught matters
.. students who ask me to write their college recommendations when I have taught them as sophomores, or who return to visit sometimes even after they are out of college
I am not that special as a teacher. Our school is full of outstanding teachers. What makes the difference is that we care about our students as well as are passionate about the subjects for which we are responsible.
If you ask me my subject, it is Government. It has also been English, Reading, US History, World History, Study Skills, Social Issues, and Comparative Religion.
If you ask me what I teach, it is students.
The current direction of our national educational policy makes it ever harder to teach students rather than be locked in to preparing for tests.
It is why I may well retire at the end of this year, when I will be 66, rather than continue teaching at least until I am 70 as I had planned. I have the energy to keep teaching student. I do not have the heart to teach in an environment that robs them. Our current educational policy makes the situation, unfortunately, far more of the latter.
While I love the article it again tries to pass the buck to the school based administrator. The process of removing a teacher who has received ‘due process rights’ is absolutely brutal and is what needs revamping. As an administrator I can be removed at any time for any reason, but the teacher who parents, students and other teachers claims is incompetent takes a minimum of 90 days and 60 days worth of follow up documentation. It requires multiple weekly observations and meetings of reflection and then a recommendation to the board. I know that the community, the school and most importantly the kids deserve a better process.
The content of this article stirs the heart. I now understand the emotion that I have been carrying around for months…it is grief. There is a sense of loss associated with the reality of what American education has become compared to what it was intended to provide. Day by day, teachers are waking up to the awareness of how devastating the situation is for the children of our country. The time for standing up and speaking up is now. Take your beliefs to the voting booth. Ask questions of your district officials. Demand attention. This is our life’s passion that is being destroyed. Any real reform will come from the doorways of our classrooms…not from the people furthest away from the students.
I am a grandmother and spent some time raising two of my grandchildren. I was shocked at how these children prepared for these tests.
For 3 weeks prior to, no homework and constant reviewing to pass. They were little nervous wrecks. It was sad to see them put through this torcher. They were so afraid if they didn’t pass they wouldn’t be promoted. I can tell you this is not a way to have a child enjoy school.
School is about learning and yes, having fun. Some fun has to be incorporated otherwise you just have that book work, chalk board teacher and no that’s not a way to teach. There has to be classroom interaction.
I also agree, parent involement is a neccessity, but some just won’t. They too woud rather be on the computer, their phones, or just watching T.V., or as they say, they just don’t have time. I hear these younger parents say I worked all day and I am tired. I worked all day raising my children and there were times I was exhausted, but we always had homework time. That’s part of being a parent!
How we are teaching these children is my concern. They cram so much at them so fast, that the “average” child would have a hard time retaining what they learned 2 weeks ago. I was in awe.
I realize we want to raise our standard of education, but we need to take a good look at how we are doing it.
Longer days in school, longer hours. Do they really think this helps a child learn more? Retain more? Made your test scores better? I realize teachers don’t set the days or hours, but can you not have some input? Has this increased the drop out rate, the truancy rate?
Then we have 4th graders doing Alegebra. These children don’t even have the time to master their multiplication and division facts down before this is being introduced. Give them time to really learn the basics before introducing new concepts. Their little heads are trying to absorb all this information. If we are going to introduce Alegebra in the 4th grade, then we need to start doing multiplication in the 1st.
I have a hard time understanding why curriculum has changed so much. We did Alegebra in 8th or 9th, Geometry in 9th or 10th, Alegebra 2 in 10th or 11th and Trig in 11th or 12th. Then on to college. We were ready for it. . Why push these little children so hard so long and so fast?
Wonder why there is just a huge increase in the drop out rate? Wonder why children aren’t motivated to go to school?
I do applaud the majority of teachers for working so hard. You should all be given awards. I realize that every child is different and that has to be a great challenge in itself. Some parents have problems just raising their own.
I do not teach school, I teach dance, but I know that, even with a curriculum, I still have to adjust my teaching methods, per class, to the different dynamics of the students. If I had to spend my time making them learn to pass a test, they would go nowhere.
I have watched, as a grandmother, our school system decline. Things that I learned in school, that were the most important skills, are not being taught properly, and all of the creativity is being taken from these students.
I cannot imagine a world without creativity. Where would all of the great inventions be without developing the creative side of the brain?
It is so distressing when kids cannot write properly, cannot do math in their heads, cannot think on their own. That is why so many parents have decided on homeschooling and charter schools. My daughter is hoping to get her own daughter into a charter school because it really does offer more than the local public school. How sad is that?
Maybe our gov’t needs to let the educators run the system, not the politicians.
This article is wonderful! I have been working in an urban school district for 6 years. For the last 3 years, we have not received raises and the district started using furlough days, which are basically pay cut days. It’s been a real struggle for everyone, but not one teacher has quit. We are here for the children and we are not going anywhere!
I agree with most of what this article says, but not the part about charter schools. I am a teacher at a charter school and we have 80% free/reduced lunch. A large majority of our students are ELLS, half of my conferences with parents have to be translated. Our school also has many special education students, and my classroom this year will have 28 children, all who are the majority of the groups above. All of us, public schools, charter, private, as educators need to work together. Yes, it needs to start somewhere, preferrably at the start of life, but if not, there’s nothing we can do about it. We can only work with what we have, and do the best that we can. Help them to love each other, love themselves, love learning, and teach them how to work hard for something that they are passionate about. That’s the key to our country’s future.
In response to confused: We are not paid for attending our staff meetings, we go because we are told to go. Our paid professional development was taken away by Tony Bennett and Mitch Daniels a few years ago. If we want to pursue becoming a better teacher, we do it on our own time-typically on weekends and during breaks. We do not get paid more, in fact our salaries are currently frozen. There is no hope that we will even get a cost of living raise for a very, very long time. Finally, if Franklin township would have voted “yes” on their referendum busing would once again be available to all students in the district. Education received a $300 million cut last year in Indiana. The district had to make cuts and since people didn’t want to pay higher property taxes, now parents have to pay to have their child transported to school.
As an Indiana teacher, it is a dismal time to live here.
Our society has changed a great deal, I am not a teacher, I have a 17 year old and a 9 year old. I feel a great responsibility for the lack of education my 17 year old has received. Not that teachers administrators didn’t try over and over. We threatened, and disciplined at home, but he was at school for at least 8 hours a day. He has ADHD, so at the best of times he has been kind of difficult to teach. At this point the lack of authority they have in the classroom I think is a great result of the issues in the classrooms.
It seemed like in some classes he was in the teacher was more of a referee rather than able to teach. He wasn’t the only one, there were many like him. The teacher was unable most of the time to make the classes fun, the kids interest was more into the cel phones or whatever other gadget they had, rather than what she was able to teach to them. My son can take a test, but he is challenged to learn, a challenge he doesn’t rise up to well. His plan is to go into the military, but in order to do that he has to get a diploma, or take college classes. I remember having fun in school, but I also remember there was a lot that I didn’t really want to do, but had to do because it was required. Not because it was all fun.
I think blaming the schools isn’t the answer. Yes things need to change, I think support from many quarters needs to be had in order for this to happen. I don’t think any teacher ever chose to go into that profession because the pay is great. I agree with the statement ‘success or failure needed to be shared equally by the family and the school.’
“…turn teachers into “at will” employees, not professionals”
Well, Diane, last time I checked, doctors, lawyers, accountants, stockbrokers, bankers, and every other white collar professional in this country works “at will.” So if teachers want to free themselves from the union yoke and join the white collared, professional class then they need to work “at will” like everyone else.
As an advocate for at-risk students/schools in New York I have met students who have witnessed first hand war in their countries of origin, live in shelters, are former gang members or are newly released prisoners. This is who we are as Americans and New Yorkers. No test-prep or standardized methodology will ever educate or heal the broken childhoods lived by the neediest in our cities/states.
Thank you Diane for every post, speaking engagement, book, tweet and article you share with us.
The other issue with NCLB is that scarce resources are taken from the public schools and given to charters, or in the case of vouchers, private schools. Those schools might have better stats, but they don’t have to take all students. In fact, they routinely reject those they don’t want because of disability, behavior, etc. Eventually, the only kids left in public schools will be those undesirables no one else wants. This could extend to religion or race because private schools don’t have to follow federal laws. So basically, NCLB will destroy the public schools. I can’t help but wonder if that was the goal.
Is it any wonder that homeschooling is currently the fastest growing form of education!
Let’s not forget that the United States is probably the only country that educates the masses. We can not or should not let the government end public education as we know it. By privatizing or funneling money to charter schools we weaken our educational system.When in fact we should be funding it fairly. How long can we go with unfunded state mandates such as class size and 30 minutes of PE daily??? This year we are already breaking the law by not meeting class but the school district would rather pay the fines than hire more teachers. Instead of 30 minutes of P.E. kids are watching exercise shows instead of working with a trained P.E. teachers. We are again failing our kids and specially with the rate of childhood obesity, we are killing our children. Wake up America and fight for our kids. Fight for what the founders of this country established, there is no charter schoolin our constitution.
@Lori this article needs to be shared with people outside of education, too. Everyone needs to understand what is happening to public education because of the education “deformers.”
Diane Ravitch is a brave soul. Her wisdom needs to be shared with everyone.
Thank you, Diane, for being the voice of reason in an increasingly unreasonable debate.
After teaching for 32 years and loving every minute of it until NCLB, I retired in its wake. It only took a couple of years for me to realize that teaching had become nothing more than test prep and time on task. And to the comment above that disparages fun, let me suggest that students will have fun if the teacher does. I sucked in a lot of kids with the sheer force of my enthusiasm. When it wasn’t fun for me anymore–when there was no time left to actually listen or talk to kids–I knew it was time to go.
One more thing: it seems to me if we could mold a society where every parent had a job that made them feel valued and kept them from poverty, many of our educational problems would simply vanish.
(Replying to comment) No, ESL students do not take a different test. Your common sense reaction is ignored! Learning happens in the mind of the learner. That is what is forgotten or ignored. As the great Madeline Hunter always said, effective teachers increase the PROBABILITY of learning. No teacher, no matter how great, can make learning happen. Who will pay for pre-natal care? We, as a nation, need to. At the same time we need to confront the national problem of young teenagers having children. Thank you Diane for your courage and commonsense.
Im just a young mommy and student…but arent students a reflection of society? Dont teachers have to adjust their style of teaching based on the individuals? I think the term “make learning fun” means so much more then how you interpereted it. Teachers need an entire community to pitch in to get the results they want for the young ones. Right? Cram my head full of knowledge…if it doesnt interest me I wont get it. I wont use it. I dont know Donna Adams..no disrespect but that kind of sounds like an old fashioned way of thinking. I wonder how many people agree. Out of curiousity…ill be using this artical as an assignment for my Cdv 180 class
Bravo, Dr Ravitch. As a teacher of 23 years, I spend an average of $1000.00 per year of my own money to supply my classroom that the county and state of TN refuse to fund adequately. Most of the legislative tightwads in TN send their children to adequately funded private schools with small class sizes, curriculum in the arts, advanced sciences, music, theater, extra-curricular sports facilities and highly paid coaches, with extraordinary facilities. The teachers all have advanced degrees and have years of experience. Don’t our poor communities deserve the same educational opportunities? These aren’t the recommendations for inner-city schools being advocated by the edu-industrialists.
Further, Confused is certainly confused about our profession. Planning and collaboration are critical to quality teaching. I often work up to 70 hrs per week preparing lesson plans and materials since our system pretends that 30 min per day is enough to plan, grade, collaborate with professionals and parents, attend IEP meetings,sponsor clubs, and much more.
“make school fun”. I’m afraid this is where some of the achievement began to slide. A requirement that everything be “fun.” I remember seeing a musical based on Studs Terkel’s book “Working” where a teacher is complaining about all the things he’s expected to do during a day, and he’s standing in front of a portable chalkboard that says,”Having fun with the times tables.” Nowadays students often don’t feel any obligation to become engaged intellectually if they don’t find a lesson “fun.” And because they are so jaded and wrapped up in their electronic gadgetry, less and less is “fun” for them. It sometimes feels like teachers are low-paid entertainers that kids don’t believe because they aren’t getting paid like other entertainers, such as sports figures, rock stars, fashion models, and actors. Schools don’t operate in a vacuum, but our society expects 100% educational achievement against a surge of anti-intellectual attitudes nationwide and a culture that fills its evenings with “reality” TV.
Pt. 2
I am in this field because I love my job and worked hard like you to make a living for my family. I have gone to college, gotten a master’s degree an have earned the right to earn a wage competitive to those with the same education. I work extremely hard for my students!
This is truly the problem with education today! Model for your child “accountability, work ethic, humility, foster independence in your child, practice with the emotional skills to make them a contributor to society…This is your job as a parent but we as educators have taken the role as parent because many “parents” can’t seem to purvey these life skills, values…to their own children. I happily teach these skills daily to my students but as as a parent it is your responsibility to foster these skills in your child. Teachers have taken the role as parent!
@ Confused…
You are confused! What meetings are you referring to??? Professional Development by chance? Effective need time periodically to collaborate together…We do plenty before, at lunch, after, evenings, weekends, summers…for your child/ren. What do you do for them yourself?
I haven’t seen a raise in 10 yrs, have lost nearly $20k a year…supplies. Do you know how much the average teachers spend on materials/supplies annually? Most of us spend $4000-5000! Which my taxes reflect! Also, don’t boo hoo over $50. It’s your child. Our students don’t pay a dime for supplies…guess to gets to shop this weekend to get the materials you child would need…Moi and everyother teacher
I have shared this article with all my teacher friends.
I sure agree with Lori….People do not understand what a teacher goes through. We try our best….We put it all out there for the kids….we stoop to their level and explain, and re-show, and even draw pictures….but kids are not all the same. Yes…some learn quickly…some learn by listening, by looking,by doing, but some just cannot understand what is going on. As a child I spoke only Italian, and I went to Kdgn. and never knew what the teachers were saying…I just looked and figured it out myself. I HEARD the alphabet sung in the first grade, but in my mind I HEARD “elle meno p” which in Italian meant L MINUS P.
For years I tried to figure out what they were saying, Yes…I knew my alphabet, but could not understand how to subtract P from L….Through my years of teaching, I always looked at those kids who were hard learners, and tried to figure out if they were hearing “L minus P…instead of the clear cut L, M, N O, P.
This is what we teachers are dealing with…what is that child HEARING? Don’t judge a teacher by the results of TESTING….judge by know WHO the child is, and what PROBLEMS may he have. Is he absorbing what we are teaching? Maybe he can’t hear, or can’t totally see….EACH CHILD IS HIS/HER OWN SELF
and we teachers try darn hard to reach them. A big HARRAH for every teacher!!!
Having been in the educational field for 47 years, and now retired, I commend Diane Ravitch for “telling it like it is!” I have taught in the inner-city, in affluent neighborhoods, in areas of great poverty, and also in schools that have had a large number of English-deficient children, over several states. To put all ten year-olds, or fourth graders as an example, into one mold is utterly ridiculous! If one has a thimble, glass, and a stein side by side, all filled to capacity, one cannot deny that all are not equal, but each is at its maximum volume. Children are different also. Some learn slowly, some learn quickly, some are gifted, and many may have difficulties stemming from different areas: physical, language, home, poverty, etc. They are not neatly packaged to be stacked on a shelf.
Most teachers are dedicated, devoted people, but to judge the outcome of a test on the teacher alone, is definitely not just. One year the teacher may be blessed with a superior class, and noted as a success. The next year, in spite of previous year’s failures of the class, they are considered a poor teacher. However, there are many short-sighted people who will judge them on that basis. I, also, am glad that Ms. Ravitch explained TENURE as THE RIGHT TO DUE PROCESS, not a life-time job security. Perhaps that would be a better way to phrase it.
The NCLB and THE RACE TO THE TOP sound good on paper, but not in theory. Yes, education does need to change, but not through multiple answer tests or the totality of test scores. Threats and humiliation are more detrimental than helpful. Develop the creativity, initiative of students, thinking and thought processes through problem solving, and we will have better schools.
Ms Ravitch is a saint for writing this article. I get down on my knees and thank God for people like her who may very well lead the call for sanity in educating our best resource, our precious children. She has absolutely nailed it. The only thing I would add is that there is a real need for parenting classes. Folks who had bad parenting tend to parent badly. I have seen it every year of my 39 year teaching career.
I am retiring next year due largely to the NCLB and Race to the Top policies. I do not feel like a good teacher anymore. I am simply teaching these babies how to memorize sets of standardized facts and take tests. We are doing a terrible disservice to our youth.
This article should be mandatory reading for every legislator, parent, teacher, school administrator, hmmmm, maybe everyone should read this!
Thank you so very much for this wonderful missive! I am deeply appreciative that you would stand up to the system.
Confused- why would they be keeping kids at school longer if the reason was to have meetings amongst themselves? They’re doing it to get more instructional time for the students.
Confused, I agree that schools need to have the best interest of the students at heart, but as a teacher I disagree that it’s all about us. Teachers do not decide the times students are at school, nor do we decide what a student/family is charged. My salary is MUCH lower that it was when I was in the business field. I took this job because I want to be here and work with the students (not because I have to) even though it meant a pay cut. Our class sizes are growing each year and resources (financial and otherwise) are being cut. My job is wonderful, but it’s not as easy as people think. I wish parents and the public could understand how much work goes on before/after school to ensure that their students have a good experience. It’s an honor to be a teacher, but it takes hard work and investing a lot of time.
C. Darwin was right – we DO need parent/family support in encouraging students and holding them accountable. Most kids have no idea how much potential they have. It’s our job to help them to see it.
One last comment: Make learning fun, don’t mar the process with mandatory tests that has no meaning to the education of the children. A happy class is a learning class.
I think schools should be about teaching the children not about national test scores. If the teachers have the proper education and means, which includes proper school supplies and equipment, then they would be able to better fullfill the role of teaching the children what is needed to make it in life and in the society that they will be moving into as they graduate. But also the students have the responsability to go to school, study, and do their best to obtain the education that they need, the teachers can’t make the students learn unless the student has the desire to learn. Parents also have a responsability to incourage their children to want to go to school and to do their homework, to study and improve themselves even if the parents themselves did not achieve these goals. Education is a community affair Starting with the family and friends, the affordable qualities of the school, the teachers ability to gain student trust, and the student’s desire to learn. Each student should, during their education, be evaluated as to the students potentials whether it be art, mathmatics, history, mechanics or agriculture and incouraged to pursue those areas of expertice. I know from experiance a person doing something they enjoy will perform much better than someone doing things they dislike.
I agree with much of what Diane Ravitch says; especially testing. The only difference is that I wonder who will pay for the prenatal care and nutrition of the poor pregnant woman, and high-quality early education for the child before entering kindergarten. I also believe that in many areas, not necessarily proverty stricken areas, there are many children who do not speak English; and that situation needs to be addressed. When these tests were being administered, were these non-english speaking children given different tests. If not, that would certainly affect tests scores. I am sure there are some incompetent teachers, but I think the majority are competent. Somehow, it doesn’t seem right to blame failing students and low test scores on teachers. When is the student and parent responsible? I think that is often called “passing the buck,” or “scapegoat”.
School is all about teachers and adminisraters instead of the kids. They are adding more hours to the school day ( so teachers can have time for their meetings ) Paying the teachers more , charging more for school supplys and a school here in Indiana is charging them $50:00 a week for each child to ride the school bus!