I received a letter from a student in Renton, Washington. I will not include the student’s name, to protect his or her privacy. I was moved by the honesty and thoughtfulness of this letter. If we have 11-years old this smart, our nation’s future is secure. This young person makes me feel like a teacher. I can’t think of a better way to feel today!
“Dear Mrs. Ravitch,
First of all, let me say that you are my inspiration. I love all that you do. I love how you blog every day. It helps me find out what’s happening to our world.
My name is —– ——. I go to Nelsen Middle School. I live in Renton, Washington. I am 11 years old. I especially like one of the blogs you wrote about on March 13, 2013, “The Day the Teachers Said No.” I strongly agree with you there’s no point to do this pointless testing if all they are doing is marketing students. I like how you said, “in unity there is strength.”
Another one of your blogs called “National day of action for Garfield High School and Seattle Schools Boycotting the MAP.” I’m so glad they’re boycotting it because there is no need to take the test. Like I said before, it is pointless.
The last blog piece I really liked was “Are You As Smart as a 5th Grader,” some of the stuff I thought we were supposed to learn in another grade, I mean really.
Thank you for what you do. I bet thousands of thousands of people read your blog every day and I’m happy to be one of them.
Sincerely,
——- ———“
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Our students are amazing. They can detect phoniness and injustice so easily. Thanks for sharing this honest student’s letter.
Few things are more gratifying than letter from students. Now you know why.
Oops. “letters.”
Indeed. I think we all keep a box of them tucked away, which we browse through on bad days.
Nice to hear that “reform” has not completely quashed our children’s ability to think critically.
Terrific letter! Thanks so much for sharing it!!
Diane, I’m wondering why you would not already feel like a teacher. You certainly seem like a very wise teacher to me. Have you never taught any courses, including in higher ed?
I concur! Diane, I consider you my professor. You ARE a teacher, your blog is one of your classrooms. Thank you for modeling dialogue, logic, character, civics… and much more!
I am so happy I opened the blog today. The 11 year old who commented also provides me with a sense that our youth want to have a voice in what makes sense and what doesn’take sense. She must have also been touched by some very empowering educators along her journey!
Once the students reject the tests and motivation to simply endure is lost, we will get somewhere! Kudos to this young student for having the courage to speak up. I encourage this enlightened student to now share these convictions with local officials and talk it up with other students, as well. Anything of importance begins with one person who believes in it enough to take the message elsewhere until a throng of people can help move it on down the road to acceptance.
Ms. Ravitch, as a teacher, let me say that you are also my inspiration… 🙂
Great opinion piece in the NY Times today…no learning without feeling. Critical of the national standards..see excerpt and full link:
Language may compose who we are as much as we compose it. Language teaching, therefore, is unlike other content areas. Text selection is the most critical component of any English curriculum, but our educational leaders have avoided the discussion of what works of literature a national canon might include in favor of a curriculum that treats the study of literature as though it were a communication system unrelated to who we are as people.
My fear is that we cannot reckon with the difficult truths of real works of art, that the disturbance we feel when reading Alice Walker’s “Color Purple” is rated too disruptive to the analysis of student yearly progress to be read for a test. My suspicion is that the Common Core enumerates skills and not books because as a country we still feel that real works of art are too divisive. It is more comfortable to remain agnostic, to permit our teens to remain an education-product consumer group, fed skills-building exercises that help adults to avoid the hard truths our children have no choice but to face.
There are no agnostic texts on college campuses, but texts dense with philosophical, psychological and moral meaning. There are no state tests for college students. It is time to align our education system with college demands by opening a real discussion about what teens should read in middle school and high school. Tests given to adolescents need to be based on books students read in school.
Put this way, it sounds obvious, but it isn’t what we’re doing. Skills-based standards ignore the basic fact that language learning must occur in a meaningful context. The basis for higher-level learning — for philosophy, psychology, literature, even political science — is the emotions and impulses people feel every day. If we leave them out of the picture, reading is bled of much of its purpose.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/no-learning-without-feeling.html?pagewanted=2&ref=opinion
Everytime someone mentions American higher ed as a model, which I think it should be, I cringe because it’s next as a target of “reform.”.
Over 800 colleges today don’t even require the ACT or SAT for admissions and I truly fear that the federal government is aiming to mandate standardized testing in colleges, from entrance to graduation, due to moneyed interests, perceptions that it’s an untapped market and Obama/Duncan’s failure to recognize anything that is working in education and leave well enough alone.
You might be pleased to know that my university only requires students to have a C average in their high school academic courses for admission. Alternatively they will be admited with a sufficiently high SAT/ACT score or high enough class standing.
I should add that when I began teaching at the university any student with a high school diploma was automatically admitted to the university. That was found to be unworkable.
This eleven-year old reads educators’ blogs? We call that good parenting!
It is promising, but by the time she’s 18, she’ll have been brainwashed by the global warming, save the chickadee folks among you and won’t be able to think worth a damn.
Au contraire. S/he is very likely to be able to discern smug, holier than thou, science denying conservatives aiming to inculcate her into the hate mongering Tea Party after reading just one sentence.
Nah. The Tea Party is the party of love. It’s the Democrats, socialists, and crypto communists who are the haters. Actually, your little post proves that you are among the most intense of the leftist haters. Why is that? Are you nostalgic for a time when you thought you had an immortal soul? The socialist lie, that you are a social atom, and not an individual? Or do you believe that your individuality is a fiction, a creation of your society? When you die, what happens to “you”? Eh?
S/he should also be able to discern how, when confronted with reality, such hate mongerers live in denial, project their own shortcomings onto those they hate, while promoting their anti-social disposition as if it’s a good thing, and more readily recognize that although individualism is very important, “No man is an island.”
“When you die, what happens to “you”? Eh?”
I’ll be dead, no longer alive. At that point the best I could hope for is to be allowed to be buried in a pine box so that I could become worm food and food for the trees around my burial site. Unfortunately, I couldn’t have that done for me even on my own land out in the middle of the woods in the beautiful Missouri River hill country of southern Warren County, MO. Humans love to think that somehow they are “above” ol Ma Nature.
Some things just cannot be quantified – http://goo.gl/dmu2p