"The status quo today is not good..."

Diane Ravitch on The President's Speech

The status quo today is not good. For 10 years we have pursued the heavy-handed mandates of No Child Left Behind, with meager results. Now with Race to the Top and the Obama administration's "blueprint," we appear ready to impose failed ideas on yet another generation of children. This obsession with testing, ranking, grading, evaluating, measuring, labeling, and sorting students has nothing to recommend it. The winners continue to win, and the losers continue to lose. Testing should be used for diagnostic purposes, to help students and teachers, not for high-stakes accountability. High-stakes testing corrupts testing and corrupts education and causes us to lose sight of the purposes of education.-- Bridging Differences