Just in ... on education

In The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, Diane Ravitch, Research Professor of Education at New York University (NYU), critiques current conventional wisdom about the American educational system. She herself has changed positions on what she previously advocated for reform. Her prescriptions for improving our schools:

• Leave decisions about schools to educators, not politicians or businessmen
• Devise a truly national curriculum that sets out what children in every grade should be learning
• Expect charter schools to educate the kids who need help the most, not to compete with public schools
• Pay teachers a fair wage for their work, not "merit pay" based on deeply flawed and unreliable test scores
• Encourage family involvement in education from an early age

Some chapter titles: - Hijacked! How the Standards Movement Turned Into the Testing Movement. - NCLB: Measure and Punish. - Choice: The Story of an Idea. - The Trouble with Accountability.

LA217.2 R38 2009
283 pp.
ISBN-10: 0465014917
ISBN-13: 978-0465014910