Education Soapbox

So here I stand on my soapbox... As a passionate educator, I have been using my time away from the classroom to research the problems that haunt me with today's federal education policies, to write letters to my congressional representatives and speak to anyone who will listen.

I just came across a book that explains the troubles I see with it. The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch. Her name might sound familiar as she was Bush's Assistant Secretary of Education. One might wonder why I would align myself with someone associate with No Child Left Behind. The leading education historian, Ravitch humbly refutes what she has said in the past and now looking back on the effects sees a very different picture. She illustrates in her book, the exact problems I have seen on the ground and in the trenches of public education.

Two of the major problems she points out are the perverse way in which standardized tests are used to create a high stakes atmosphere and the promotion of charter schools. While charter schools are not in themselves a bad idea, the way in which they are used is not what the legislation intends. The intention of them is to provide alternative learning institutions that would hopefully catch those children who are not being reached in the traditional public school system. This is by and large not the case. With the exception of few they are becoming more like publicly funded private schools, options for students with informed, well educated and primarily middle to upper middle class families. While students in the most poverty stricken areas continue to go to schools who have high teacher turn-over rates and are now adopting scripted curricula in a desperate attempt to raise test scores.

Test scores are being so inappropriately used, that they are actually having the reverse affect and leaving kids behind, creating a bigger cultural devide. Amazing teachers are leaving schools who have "poor performing" student for fear of the cloud that will be cast over them for being at a school with lower test score, that do not account for the challenges that community has - language barriers, poverty, high transiency rates. Obama's changes, which I had such high hopes for, don't change much. He once spoke about the missuses of these tests and now is going to reward teachers based on test scores.

Here are some great articles I found that addresses some of my concerns: http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/03/26/diane_ravitch_interview/

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/03/education_reform_0