No Child Left Behind Advocate Shifts Position

In an interview Tuesday with NPR, Ravitch cited one of the major components of NCLB, standardized testing, and said it “lowered the standards” in schools across the nation. While certainly setting a standard for student achievement is important, Ravitch says NCLB’s strategy has encouraged cheating, “It turns out as a result of putting so much emphasis on the test scores, there’s a lot of cheating going on, there’s a lot of gaming the system. Instead of raising standards it’s actually lowered standards because many states have ‘dumbed down’ their tests or changed the scoring of their tests to say that more kids are passing than actually are.”

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