"Imagine a federally funded program that provides academic access to poor children, pays private vendors millions of dollars to hire tutors with questionable experience, gives them autonomy to choose their hourly pay rates and pupil-teacher ratios, and accepts vendors' unconfirmed 'self-evaluation' as evidence of academic improvement, a crucial condition for staying in the program. Imagine understaffed local school districts saddled with the job of spending precious Title I funds to pay thousands of invoices . . . Now imagine this program is part of the NCLB Act." (It is!)
-Joan Jacobson, freelance writer

"The very nature of standardized testing is that new ideas are punished. If we have a generation of kids who can't think for themselves, our whole country is in trouble. Nations that have the highest test scores have the lowest creativity scores. The more we raise our test scores, the more we sacrifice creativity."
- Diane Ravitch, education historian

"We have turned school testing into a huge corporate profit center, led by Pearson for whom $32 million is actually pretty small potatoes. Pearson has a 5-year testing contract with Texas that's costing the state's taxpayers nearly half-a-billion dollars. This is the part of education nobody told you about. You heard about accountability, and choice, and innovation. But when No Child Left Behind was passed eleven years ago, do you recall anybody mentioning that it would provide monster profits for the private business sector?"
- Gail Collins, New York Times columnist

"I'm not against the use of tests. I'm against attaching rewards and punishments to it. When you do that, you destroy the measure."
- Diane Ravitch, education historian

"I have been seeing profound demoralization among teachers in America today. It is almost hard to convey. Teachers feel they are being held accountable for social conditions beyond their control. We have to have an ethos in education of encouragement, support, at the same time encourage and respect teachers and stop beating up on them."
- Diane Ravitch, education historian

"Nobody elected Bill Gates to run our schools, and yet his money is driving so many policies and so many of these reforms. Parents are drowned out because we don't have the dollars behind us."
- Sue Peters, parent and co-founder of the local Parents Across America chapter.

"I find it astounding that taxpayers are continuing to spend millions of tax dollars on test development, implementation, test scoring, and evaluation systems associated with testing at a time when our schools are going broke. We have experimented with test-based accountability for a decade and we have seen no growth in student achievement that justifies its continuation."
- Carol Corbett Burris, principal, South Side High School, NY

"What has happened . . . is that [charter schools have] become an enormous entrepreneurial activity, and the private sector has moved in. So there are now charter chains where the heads are paying themselves $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 a year. They compete with regular public schools. They do not see themselves as collaborators with public schools but business competitors and, in some cases, they actually want to take away the public school space and take away the public school business."
- Diane Ravitch, education historian