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The highest priorities of the Education Reform movement are not demonstratably best practices in education.

Here are some articles that help to get this point across.

7 July 2010 article referencing a book by Diane Ravitch ,,,

[Author: Joseph A Polermo; Publication: Huffingtonton Post], A statement from In her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education, Diane Ravitch, who was a devotee of No Child Left Behind-type policies when she served as Assistant Secretary of Education under Poppy Bush, shows that the data is in and the corporate educational "reforms" that have been rammed through for the past twenty years have amounted to nothing more than the downsizing and shredding of what was once a thriving public education system in this country. [...] :...go to the article URL

7 July 2010 article by Scott Lilly  published in Huffingtong Post  :...go to the article URL

[...]What is disturbing to me is how those who are parading under the banner of school and teacher accountability are so unwilling to be subjected to accountability standards themselves. What reformers now argue is that the central problem facing learning today is the teaching force and the entrenched unions protecting that force. As popular as that criticism may be in many quarters, Congress has an obligation to find out what evidence backs up those claims. Are schools with weak unions or no unions producing better results? Do charter schools give more value to the taxpayer and the student than noncharter schools? Will Education Secretary Duncan's plan result in schools attracting better teachers than the ones they succeed in firing?

The evidence available for those questions is not one sided. The person who many might describe as the "mother" of the current education accountability movement, Diane Ravitch, now believes that the preponderance of evidence argues against such reforms. Ravitch, now a professor of education history at New York University, fostered the move toward pupil testing as a means of establishing greater teacher accountability when she served as a senior Education Department appointee in the first Bush administration. She not only questions the effectiveness of many of the in vogue attempts at establishing teacher accountability and charter schools, but she also recently wrote a column in favor of the Obey amendment. In it she says:...go to the article URL