author: Diane Ravitch
name: Elaine
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2010/09/06
date added: 2010/09/13
shelves: history, non-fiction, politics, sociology
review:
She closely reviews the literature around accountability testing and school choice, after describing how she came to be an advocate for those things. Curiously enough, she wrote the history curriculum for CA in the late 80s that I went to high school under. And the data doesn’t follow what she had hoped for, in fact in many cases it’s entirely counter-productive. If you’ve followed this stuff at all, then there’s nothing massively surprising, but lots of interesting food for thought. (A friend of mine is a high school English teacher in Texas; I’ve listened to a few rants.) A good reminder that there are no simple options for improving education, altho there are lots of simple obvious ones…that happen to be wrong.
What I find curious, personally, is that she was an advocate of these ideas at all. Her background is in looking at the simplistic education fads of the past, so choice and testing ought to have sounded warning bells. A testimony to the power of peer pressure, I suppose.