Testing has been a major measurement of American public-school student achievement for several decades, especially during the past fifteen years. Students must take tests almost yearly, which will determine much of their educational future. Diane Ravitch, a professor and historian of education, writes in her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System about how schooling has changed over the past fifteen years, beginning with the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002. She discusses testing, privatization, restructuring, and many other common themes among American public schools. Education is greatly based on two things, which writer, research fellow, and mechanic Matthew Crawford allows us to understand. In his book, …show more content…
While he does not necessarily suggest that this is always bad, he does point out that it tends to change our perception of the real world at the time we are experiencing it. Diane Ravitch brings up a similar point in her book when she elaborates on testing and its effects. Based on test scores and statistics, educators and policymakers make conclusions about how well students are doing and what needs to change about their education. She elaborates on how this emphasis on test scores has led to much of schooling being focused on passing tests, and how a large portion of what we value in schools has …show more content…
It became a yearly progress point just to see if a student could read and do math appropriately for his or her grade level, instead of an overall assessment of the student’s progress as an individual and a citizen in the world over time. The accountability piece of the testing movement (where people would be fired and schools closed in result of failure) played an important role in shifting attention away from creating functional human beings to making sure children can perform basic tasks associated with schooling (Ravitch). These goals to produce individuals and citizens were lost in the process of producing proficient readers and mathematicians. There were increasingly less classes in the arts and music, and even sciences and social studies, where students would learn applications and critical thinking. But more importantly, the testing did not do much to improve students’