Comments

1. Mark Rutherford Said,

   Diane Ravitch wants to wave a wand and send American education back to what it was in the 1950s – pretty good. She refuses to see that the quality of teachers has declined; that Albert Shanker, sadly, is long dead, and has been replaced by union leaders without the slightest concern for anything but making teachers impossible to manage and to fire; and that, left to their own devices, education authorities go for whatever idiotic ideas are currently fashionable, such as contructivist math. In this situation, accountability and testing, for all their weaknesses, are the only way to ensure decent outcomes for kids; and empowering parents with vouchers, ideally, and abundant charters as a second-best, is better than nothing.
   
   That Diane cannot see this – and that such brilliant minds as Rita Kramer, an Amazon reviewer of this sad wreck of a book, would be swayed by Ravitch’s blindness – is a wonder, given the wisdom she has demonstrated over the years.
   
   Any parent would understand that the educational institutions Ravitch desiderates for their children has not been available to schoolchildren for decades; while the best realistic alternatives available to them – charters and vouchers – she scorns for no reason, except that union-funded evaluations evaluate them badly. To us parents she offers nostalgia and dusty memories of past glories – and it tastes of ashes.

   Rating: 1 / 5

2. J. Reilly Said,

   Diane Ravitch should have stopped at “The Death of”, because all she does is describe schooling from a couple of decades ago, how great it was, and how we just need to get back to that. At that point, the book completely departs from reality and into some kind of vague, polyanna-ish solution, if there is in fact any solution at all in the book.

   It’s dangerous when great thinkers like Ravitch give up on improving the system, and make no mistake; that is exactly what she has done and well documented here. We are at the beginning of a long road on education reform, and we are on the right track with accountability and some measure of competition. Ravitch’s assertion that these policies have failed is without merit and without supporting data.

   Rating: 1 / 5

3. M. Grant Said,

   I noticed on Amazon’s site that this book is not available till March 2. I say I am suspicious because if these folks got an advance copy, they may be compatriots in this school of thought for public education.

   I happened upon the book last night in a book store at the mall and read most of the first chapter. It was good to see how Ms. Ravitch admits to her changing of positions over time toward aspects of public education. I get the impression from what I read in the first chapter and what I read on the jackets of the book she wants to return to the “old” days of public education. I say that in the time frame of before public education got so political. While I do not like how it has gotten political, the reason it got there was the realization that kids were graduating high school and could not function in the business world.

   I look forward to getting the book soon and walking through Ms. Ravitch’s experience and compare hers to my 25 years in a single system that has changed from a large city county system to a mostly urban system.
   Rating: 3 / 5

4. Fredric D. Williams Said,

   As far as I can discern, Ms. Ravitch doesn’t have a long history in teaching or administration in the public schools. She went from editing a socialist magazine to writing books about education to getting a Ph.D. in education history. She spent eighteen months as a political appointee in the US Department of Education, and advocated the testing and choice now being sampled here and there around the US.

   However, her latest book merely reflects the views of someone looking down from a place in the sky (OK, at NYU anyway). She sees the reform she supported in the 1990s has been as big a failure as most top-down directives from the Washington politburo.

   Education has a powerful position in our society, and because it is mandatory for all American children and funded by taxpayers, it is impervious to change — beneficial or detrimental. Nevertheless, policy makers and academics regularly broadcast the latest reform, a series of never-ending fads, as a way to diffuse criticism.

   She says, in the fine print above the title “Great” American School System. It isn’t. We all know it. She is playing to her audience — in this case the teachers and true believers in government-managed everything.

   Government can’t manage. When it tries to manage using new techniques (testing and choice), it simply fails once again. Government can’t manage.

   And while her prescriptions may sound like the real solution at last, they are merely cliches repeated regularly for most of the past 150 years. As a historian of education she should know this:

   We need “focus on the essentials . . . a strong, coherent, explicit curriculum that is grounded in the liberal arts and sciences, with plenty of opportunity for children to engage in activities and projects that make learning lively. We must ensure that students gain the knowledge they need to understand political debates, scientific phenomena, and the world they live in. We must make sure they are prepared for the responsibilities of democratic citizenship in a complex society. We must take care that our teachers are well educated, not just well trained. We must make sure that schools have the authority to maintain both standards of learning and standards of behavior.”

   We have none of these things, and no means to achieve them. Had she better understood the problem, she would have been less enthusiastic about testing and choice as solutions. She is just another academic living in a pretend world, clueless about the real problems and unable to provide real solutions.
   Rating: 2 / 5

5. Neal McCluskey Said,

   Idealists are dangerous, not because they’re idealistic but because too often they want to impose their ideals on the rest of us. That danger is clear and present in historian Diane Ravitch’s latest book, which is troubling because Ravitch herself has furnished voluminous evidence that her ideals are unlikely to survive the test of reality.

   Ravitch is the nation’s best-known education historian. In chronicling schooling upheavals in New York City, exploring progressive domination of public education, and explaining how interest-group politics kill meaningful curricular content, Ravitch has been a tireless cataloguer of public schools’ dysfunction.

   Unfortunately, Ravitch’s own work now seems lost on her. In “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” she explains how she has gone from being a staunch supporter of public schools to an advocate of standards, testing, and choice, and back to championing public schools.

   What does Ravitch want now? “Neighborhood” public schools for all, primarily because that comports with her conviction that public schools should be tools for, essentially, forcing people together.

   “As we lose neighborhood public schools,” Ravitch rhapsodizes, “we lose the one local institution where people congregate and mobilize to solve local problems, where individuals learn to speak up and debate and engage in democratic give-and-take with their neighbors.”

   That sounds lovely. But Ravitch offers no evidence to support that claim, in no small part because it doesn’t comport with the reality she has spent years chronicling in her own works: Bureaucratic dominance over schools; divisive clashes between religious, ethnic, and other factions; and distressingly poor academic outcomes.

   As bad as her utopianism is, Ravitch’s too-often imprecise and unfair treatment of school choice might be worse.

   Ravitch categorizes as “market-based” any reform that does something other than maintain a traditional public-school monopoly. For instance, she claims, “in the first decade of the new century, New York City became the national testing ground for market-based reforms.”

   Placing control of 1.1 million children in the hands of one man–Mayor Michael Bloomberg–is market-based? True, Bloomberg has pushed for charter and public-school choice. But he rejects pricing and private-school choice, and has directed much of his attention to government-imposed standards and tests.

   Then there are Ravitch’s cheap shots against the free market, including the implication that deregulation led to the nation’s current economic woes and would be equally calamitous for education. “Deregulation contributed to the near-collapse of our national economy in 2008, and there is no reason to anticipate that it will make education better for most children.”

   Again, Ravitch offers no support for her deregulation claim. She ignores powerful evidence, such as that assembled by Johan Norberg in his book “In Defense of Global Capitalism,” that free markets make almost everything better for the people they touch. Ravitch also skirts national and international research showing more freedom leads to better educational outcomes.

   To be fair, standards-based reforms and school choice deserve some criticism.

   Standards-and-accountability efforts such as No Child Left Behind–which Ravitch rightly repudiates–have repeatedly fallen victim to special-interest power and political expediency. But they also seem to be a natural stage in the evolution of public schooling. When local “democratic” accountability proves impotent, without school choice, parents and taxpayers have little recourse but to seek accountability from higher levels of government.

   Ravitch’s main empirical objection to choice is that it hasn’t made much academic difference. But the problem is too little freedom under choice plans tried so far, not too much. With only a fraction of U.S. students able to access options, and with those options often hobbled by hostile politicians, the positive effects have naturally been small.

   That said, unrealistic expectations are at least partly the fault of choice supporters, who have been too quick to label hamstrung programs as powerful. That has played right into the hands of people like Ravitch who seem to dislike educational freedom primarily for ideological, not empirical, reasons.

   But that choice advocates have overplayed their hand doesn’t make Ravitch right. Her assault on educational freedom is weak, and her devotion to public schooling fantastical. Her own work has made that clear.
   
   Rating: 1 / 5