tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us

The Wire, Juking the Stats

I am concerned that accountability, now a shibboleth that everyone applauds, has become mechanistic and even antithetical to good education. Testing, I realized with dismay, had become a central preoccupation in the schools and was not just a measure but an end in itself.

I saw my hopes for better education turn into a measurement strategy that had no underlying educational vision at all. Eventually I realized that the new reforms had everything to do with structural changes and accountability, and nothing at all to do with the substance of learning. Accountability makes no sense when it undermines the larger goals of education. 

-Diane Ravitch, from The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

Listen to Diane Ravitch interviewed by Michael Krasny on Forum