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Education Reformer to Discuss No Child Left Behind

Education reformer Diane Ravitch will discuss “The Past and Future of No Child Left Behind” in delivering UNC’s 2006-07 Frank Porter Graham Lecture.

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 20 in Memorial Hall.

Ravitch, a former presidential education adviser and an admirer of Graham, has worked to improve American education for more than 30 years. She is considered an architect of the move toward national standardized testing, which has become a cornerstone of the federal No Child Left Behind law, enacted in 2002.

Ravitch will discuss historical antecedents of No Child Left Behind, its connection to the first Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, its implications for children in poverty, national goals of the 1990s and where we go from here.

No Child Left Behind requires mandatory testing in third through eighth grades and at least once in 10th through 12th grades. The federal government uses the test scores to evaluate teachers and schools as well as to determine students’ progress.

“The educational reforms enacted by No Child Left Behind directly impact the lives of thousands of North Carolina students, parents and educators,” said Randi Davenport, executive director of UNC’s James M. Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence, which is part of UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences and sponsor of the lecture. “Dr. Ravitch’s research explores the benefits and potential pitfalls of these testing standards.”

Ravitch was an assistant secretary of education from 1991 to 1993 during the administration of President George H.W. Bush. She served on the National Assessment Governing Board from 1997 to 2004, spanning the administrations of Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush. The 26-member board, created by Congress in 1988, sets policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, better known as the Nation’s Report Card.

Today, Ravitch is a faculty member at New York University, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Her books include The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (2003) and Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (2000).

The Frank Porter Graham lecture series honors the late U.S. senator and UNC president who was a member of the class of 1909 at Carolina. He also was noted as a champion of freedom, democracy and the disadvantaged. Taylor McMillan ’60 of Raleigh established the Frank Porter Graham Lecture Series to honor Graham.

For more information, contact the Johnston Center at (919) 966-5110 or visit the center’s Web site.


Related coverage is available online:

  • The Fourth ‘R’ – Readin’,’ritin’ and ‘rithmetic run up against unique difficulties in rural schools. Public education research has been concentrated in urban and suburban settings. UNC will try to figure out which solutions work out at the nation’s crossroads.
    From the July/August 2006 issue of the Carolina Alumni Review, available online to Carolina Alumni members.

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