http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/education/08educ.html?_r=1&hp

It’s funny. I think of my stepfather often. “If something sounds too good to be true, it’s probably not.”  So here we had a ridiculous goal–all children proficient by 2014.  That’s three years from now!  We could never reach it–unless we continued to lower and lower the standards, which, in fact, we did.

As a lawyer, I was never worried about the goal for my school districts–because I believed that when the time came, that goal would become elusive. Today it did.

Hopefully, we can now work for higher, not lower standards, and reasonable expectations for each students. Having one size fit all did not work.

About Miriam

Miriam Kurtzig Freedman, JD, MA—an expert in public education, focused on special education law— is a lawyer, author, speaker, consultant, and reformer. For more than 35 years, Miriam worked with educators, parents, policy makers, and citizens to translate complex legalese into plain English and focus on good practices for children. Now, she focuses her passion on reforming special education, with her new book, Special Education 2.0—Breaking Taboos to Build a NEW Education Law. Presentations include those at the AASA Conference, Orange County (CA), Boston College (MA), CADRE (OR), and the Fordham Institute (DC). Her writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Education Week, Education Next, Hoover Digest, The University of Chicago Law Review on line, DianeRavitch.net, and The Atlantic Monthly on line.

No Comments

Be the first to start a conversation

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *