The President's Message

"From Our Newsletter"

President Don Scheuer

 

“What a Revolting Development This Is”

 

The above statement has been attributed to several sources, including two cartoon characters, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. However, the person who said it the most was the character Chester A. Riley, played by William Bendix, on the radio and television shows aired in the forties and fifties. (I know this for a fact – I was there.) The show was called The Life of Riley and it often ended with the main character in some kind of pickle, so he would (in the tv version), turn and look at the camera and say the famous line.

 

It is perhaps a line that Dr. Diane Ravitch could have used in her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Dr. Ravitch is a historian of education at New York University and is a former Assistant Secretary of Education. When No Child Left Behind was foisted upon the nation in 2002, Dr. Ravitch hailed the move as exemplary. In 2005, she wrote, “We should thank President George W. Bush and Congress for passing the No Child Left Behind Act …All this attention and focus is paying off for younger students, who are reading and solving mathematics problems better than their parents' generation.”

 

Now, in her latest book, Dr. Ravitch has come 180 o on NCLB. In it, she characterizes the basic strategy of NCLB as measuring and punishing. She emphasizes that using test scores to measure schools has lead to cheating and the dumbing down of state assessments. She likens the school system to an Education Marketplace where schools are competing for resources which are doled out based upon scores.

 

In the book, she claims that she supported NCLB until November 30, 2006 , when she attended a conference in Washington to hear a group of scholars present their analyses of NCLB. They measure the effects of the main strategies of NCLB, namely school choice, after school tutoring and sanctions prescribed by the law. In each case, she claims, it was clear that there was no major effect from any of these strategies. The details of this are spelled out in greater detail in chapter 6 of the book, “Measure and Punish”

 

In April, 2010, Dr. Ravitch spelled out a new agenda for school reform in an article published in the Washington Post. Among her thoughts are that schools should provide an education which is much more than just basic skills; all subjects should taught and taught well. Demands for good teachers should be made, she adds and teachers should have to pass rigorous examinations. Principals, too, should be master teachers, not people who took a leadership course, and superintendents should be experienced educators. Her last statement in the article is “We have wasted eight years with the “measure and punish” strategy of NCLB. Let's not waste the next eight years

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