Analysis

In Defense of Testing-Analysis

Diane Ravitch is a former teacher of history and education at Columbia University and a former Assistant Secretary of Education. The essay, In Defense of Testing, was published in Time Magazine on September 11, 2000. In the essay, Ravitch discusses testing in schools, and how we should not write them off so quickly because they can actually be very helpful. For example, you would not want a doctor operating on you unless he/she was well trained and tested on his/her skills. Testing is just a fact of life, plain and simple.

Ravitch has had a lot of experience with this, therefore she is well equipped to write this essay. She was a teacher of history and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. So therefore, her job was to teach teachers. She was also at one point the Assistant Secretary of Education. She is the author of Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, which was published in 2000. Finally, she wrote the essay In Defense of Testing, (the topic of this paper) which was published in Time Magazine on September 11, 2000.

For most of the century, educators have used intelligence test to determine which children should be provided with high-quality education. The point of this was to find out how much a student can learn, rather than what they have learned. Based on the intelligence test, many children were assigned to "dumbed-down" courses rather than the core courses; such as math, history, foreign languages, and literature. Test should always be used to improve education. As Ravitch says in her article, "Every child should have access to a high-quality education".

In this essay Ravitch states that good tests should not just be all multiple choice, like most tests are today. Tests should have a mix in them of questions such as short answer, problem solving, true and false, essay, and some multiple choice as well. On math test, students should always have to show their work to show how...