Gary’s Reviews > The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education > Status Update

"Our schools will not improve if elected officials intrude into pedagogical territory and make decisions that properly should be made by professional educators ." BOOM!

But the root causes of poor achievement lie not in the high schools, but in the earlier grades, where students fail to learn the skills they need to keep up with their peers and to achieve academic competence." One of the reasons I switched to middle school

"This is akin to saying that every baseball team should consist only of players who hit over .300 and pitchers who win at least twenty games every season..."

"But in the eyes of the law, the responsibility of the family disappears...something is fundamentally wrong with an accountability system that disregards the many factors that influence performance on an annual test--including the students' own efforts--except for what teachers do in the classroom for forty-five minutes or an hour a day."