'Reducing education to a number'--Delpit

Here’s an excerpt from Lisa Delpit's introduction to a new edition of Other People’s Children:

“Since the publication of Other People’s Children, the country’s educational system has become caught in the vise of the No Child Left Behind Act, which mandates more standardized testing of children than the country has ever seen…. We in education have allowed politicians to push us to act as if the most important goal of our work is to raise test scores. Never mind the development of the human beings in our charge—the integrity, the artistic expressiveness, the ingenuity, the persistence, or the kindness of those who will inherit the earth—the conversation in education has been reduced to a conversation about one number… Nowhere is the result more glaring than in urban classrooms serving low-income children of color, where low test scores meet programmed, scripted teaching.”

(excerpted by Jan Resseger of United Church of Christ)

h/t Monty Neill at Fairtest