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Diane Ravitch speech at NEA 2010 Rep Assembly  

15 AUG 2010 ON EDUCATION POLICY, OBAMA IS LIKE BUSH  Washington Post -- August 15, 2010 By Dana Milbank   

• http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/13/AR2010081303197.html
• "... In federal education policy, the president and his education secretary have been the neighborhood toughs -- bullying teachers, civil rights groups, even Obama's revered community organizers....Obama has expanded the importance of standardized testing to determine how much teachers will be paid, which educators will be fired and which schools will be closed -- despite evidence that such practices are harmful. ...On July 26, a coalition of civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the National Urban League, called for an end to "federally prescribed methodologies that have little or no evidentiary support" and that use minority communities as "testing grounds." Obama's response to his supporters: Buzz off. On July 29, he gave a speech to the Urban League and said his critics are "comfortable with the status quo" and have "a general resistance to change."....When winners of the state Teachers of the Year came to town this spring, Valerie Strauss, author of The Post's Answer Sheet blog, asked several of them for their thoughts on education policy. All complained about using test scores to rate teachers....There's nothing wrong with testing, but when you use tests to determine pay and job security, you inevitably induce teachers to turn children into test-taking automatons, not the creative thinkers that have been the most valuable product of American schools. Test obsession won't help the bad schools, and it will wreck the good ones....Daniel Koretz, a Harvard professor and authority on testing, has concluded that high-stakes testing causes "substantial distortions of practice" in the classroom "and inflation of test scores." In an article published this summer, he writes: "The seriousness of this problem is hard to overstate. When scores are inflated, many of the most important conclusions people base on them will be wrong, and students -- and sometimes teachers -- will suffer as a result."