This is long and beautifully written and totally worth the time…
This: “in the early 1980s, the political winds were changing. Ronald Reagan had been elected president, and one of his first education policy initiatives was to commission a report on K-12 schools. Titled “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform,” it documented a growing unease with public schools among the business community and blamed lagging student performance for America’s troubles in the global market. The report called for more data-driven teacher evaluations and an emphasis on standardized testing—postulating (though with scant evidence) that test scores in reading and math would predict workplace performance.
The ideas set forth in “A Nation at Risk” would prove deeply influential, inspiring reform efforts all the way to the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, and the Common Core guidelines now being rolled out. The policies influenced by the report—including mass layoffs in schools that fail to raise their scores fast enough—have had a disproportionate impact on large urban districts like Philadelphia where most black teachers work. …
And while this wave of reformers has emphasized reducing the “achievement gap” between white students and those of color, it did not push as hard for integration and equitable funding. As a result, urban school administrators found themselves increasingly chasing scarce state and federal dollars tied to standardized test scores. In 2014, the Center for American Progress found that students in urban elementary schools spent 75 percent more time on average taking district-mandated tests than their suburban counterparts did—in large part because the stakes for their schools were so high. Multiple-choice questions became a major part of the daily curriculum.
0 Comments