“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

This quote is from the 1983 Regan administration publication “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. 25 years later and the situation no less bleak, the nation has seen a ever-changing menu of top-down approaches to educational reform including increased standardized testing, longer school hours, eliminating recess and tracking struggling students. In the years since this quote was written, schools have been farmed out to businessmen and philanthropists who regard the business of managing a school in the same way that they manage a Fortune 500 company, and whose lavish donations, while generous, often gloss over the fact that these men who have taken an active role in affecting educational change, have little to no understanding of the complexities involved in teaching and learning, or of the many other realities impacting urban students lives and their attitudes towards school.

The government’s latest mandate, No Child Left Behind requires that all children be performing above average on standardized tests by the year 2014. How will this be accomplished? By draining classrooms of any engaging, experiential or project-based learning, lengthening school days and years and using classroom time exclusively to teach to the tests, on whose results the salaries, careers and futures of some of our most dedicated teachers are pinned.