For decades Diane Ravitch was a tremendous supporter and proponent of school reform, advocating for government and privatized educational reforms such as America 2000, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), accountability, and charter schools. The ideas of reconstructing and reorganizing the public school system seemed like it was too good to be true; and Ravitch realized that this vision was in fact just that. Through Ravitch’s experiences, she has been exposed to the truth of the reforms that took place from the 1960’s to present day and just how damaging these attempts at improving the system can really be. As a result of these findings, Diane Ravitch raises the subject of just how the American education system is progressively failing its students
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Her main concern is how that the so-called betterment of schooling is slowly sapping the enthusiasm of both teachers and students alike and driving education into the ground by the government and privatized organizations attempting too quickly to impose changes and idealistic shortcuts to improvement; after all “in education, there are no shortcuts, utopias, and no silver bullets. For certain, there are no magic feathers that enable elephants to fly” (Ravitch, pg. 3), meaning that planning and implementing ideas for education is not easy; no one person or group can make changes to such a large system overnight. Her answer to this decline of quality education is to “turn [the] attention to improving the schools, infusing them with the substance of genuine learning, and reviving the conditions that make learning possible” (pg. 242), such as putting the emphasis on curriculum once more instead systems of accountability and standardized testing. An actual goal needs to put back into the education system, not just test …show more content…
The idea of accountability holds schools, teachers and students responsible for accomplishments and failures on testing. Doing well with test scores means that the school get more federal funding and that teachers may even get a bonus for training their students so well at test taking. When NCLB was introduced by the Bush administration in 2001 “test-based accountability- not standards- became [the] national education policy” (pg. 21) and officials and most of the public believed that the “relentless focus on testing and accountability would improve the schools” (pg. 77). This was however not the case; after NCLB was passed test scores were only very minimally improved. The more the emphasis was placed upon tests scores, the more pressure and stress students and teachers were put under. Failure to achieve an overall satisfactory score in a school could lead to staff termination and even the school being shut down and have a number of possibilities for its future, including being transformed into a charter
Her main concern is how that the so-called betterment of schooling is slowly sapping the enthusiasm of both teachers and students alike and driving education into the ground by the government and privatized organizations attempting too quickly to impose changes and idealistic shortcuts to improvement; after all “in education, there are no shortcuts, utopias, and no silver bullets. For certain, there are no magic feathers that enable elephants to fly” (Ravitch, pg. 3), meaning that planning and implementing ideas for education is not easy; no one person or group can make changes to such a large system overnight. Her answer to this decline of quality education is to “turn [the] attention to improving the schools, infusing them with the substance of genuine learning, and reviving the conditions that make learning possible” (pg. 242), such as putting the emphasis on curriculum once more instead systems of accountability and standardized testing. An actual goal needs to put back into the education system, not just test …show more content…
The idea of accountability holds schools, teachers and students responsible for accomplishments and failures on testing. Doing well with test scores means that the school get more federal funding and that teachers may even get a bonus for training their students so well at test taking. When NCLB was introduced by the Bush administration in 2001 “test-based accountability- not standards- became [the] national education policy” (pg. 21) and officials and most of the public believed that the “relentless focus on testing and accountability would improve the schools” (pg. 77). This was however not the case; after NCLB was passed test scores were only very minimally improved. The more the emphasis was placed upon tests scores, the more pressure and stress students and teachers were put under. Failure to achieve an overall satisfactory score in a school could lead to staff termination and even the school being shut down and have a number of possibilities for its future, including being transformed into a charter