Book Report: Diane Ravitch Changes Her Mind

A few years ago, I did a big reading project on education issues and education funding. As part of that project, I read a couple of things by Diane Ravitch, who has been writing about education in the US for forty years. Ravitch is a historian of education; her book Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform is very good if you like that kind of thing, and I remember The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn as my introduction into the scandal that is textbook selection in the United States.

In The Language Police, and in other places, Ravitch championed school choice and local control. She wanted schools to have autonomy over curriculum and funds, and teachers to have autonomy in the classroom. In other writings, and in her work in the Department of Education, she has been a passionate advocate of vouchers, school choice, and charter schools, as well as of standards. She thought parents would embrace the opportunity to send their children to better schools, that charter schools would be like 1000 little petri dishes where educational theories and practices of all kinds could be tested and the best ones then raised up. She thought testing programs would be founded on clear and robust curriculum standards, that the curriculum would be the driving force, and what harm could then be done by students being tested over their knowledge of that curriculum?

She wasn't just some writer blathering about these things. She influenced policy. She was a Big Name.

Her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education is her mea culpa. "How could I have been so wrong?" she asked herself. This book is her answer.

Much of the content was familiar to me, since I've been following these issues for awhile. I also loved the idea of school choice, of vouchers allowing poor parents to get their kids into schools that could serve them better, of charter schools offering parents a variety of educational options, so that they could choose the school that would best serve their own individual children.

But I was too cynical to let myself hope much. In this, I was wiser than Ravitch, but I am sorry to have been right about it.

Schools of choice? Turns out that in most places, fewer than 1% of parents choose to send their kids to a school that is not their neighborhood school. The reasons vary: people like their neighborhood schools; some parents aren't all that motivated to take an active part in choosing their children's school; many parents find the travel to an out-of-neighborhoood school prohibitive for them or their children (I remember reading a story a couple of years ago about a girl who spent 90 minutes on public transportation at the beginning and end of her school day so that she could attend a choice school. Who would wish that on their child?); it is hard to participate in extracurriculars at a school farther from home.

Ravitch said she thought there'd be a flood of discontented parents eager to move their kids to better schools if they could. Nope. No flood. 1% or fewer of eligible kids.

Charters? Turns out, in most places, they really do skim the best kids from local public schools. Kids who have parents involved enough to enroll them in charters are the same kids who are likely to do well even in a weak school, so selection bias plays a role. Also, it turns out that charters do expel problem children, who are dumped back on the local public school. (Yes, I know charters are public schools, too--but I think this language is parsimonious for my purposes.) Or they make sure they only get the most motivated kids by setting up subtle barriers to entry that nonetheless screen out the kids with less-supportive families, for instance by requiring an in-person meeting between parents and educators prior to enrollment.*

And, in most places, what they do and how they do it doesn't really look all that different from what other schools are doing. This is borne out in my very limited experience; one of my friends had her son in a charter school, for instance, and she felt that the benefits were subtle, like the kids not having to ask permission to use the bathroom.

Ravitch was dismayed and disappointed by No Child Left Behind, which focused on testing, plus rewards and sanctions for better or worse performance, without defining any curriculum standards. She had assumed there'd be curriculum standards; how could there not be? But there weren't. It was high-stakes testing divorced from any grounding in clear objectives about what children should learn.

Math and reading instruction began to edge out other subjects; test-taking strategies became a school subject; corruption and cheating were rife; state standards were watered down (in some states, the bar to be considered adequate on the tests is now as low as getting 17% of the questions right. That's an extreme example, but it's not a typo: 17% is a passing grade. This is why we have many states that claim 80-90% of, say, fourth graders are proficient in math and reading, while only 20-30% get that kind of score on the NAEP ).

All of this was entirely predictable. The problem with high-stakes testing, she quotes one researcher as saying, "is that it corrupts the tests as measures of student performance" (160). Turns out this is such a well-known thing that there's a term for it and has been for over 30 years: Campbell's Law, formulated by a sociologist in 1975, which says:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. (qtd. on p. 160)

NCLB is apparently the poster child for Campbell's Law.

There's more; Ravitch has a lot to say about the failures of the market-style approaches she had championed, and about her concerns that so much education funding is now coming from the foundations of people like Bill Gates and the Walton family (of Wal-Mart fame), who are trying to impose the business models that have made them so successful. She is concerned that the Gates foundation in particular has given so much money to almost literally every institute and publication that studies and monitors education and shapes policy that there is no one left who is enough of an outsider to offer a critique. And she does a very good critique of the current New New Idea, the idea that excellent teaching is the solution and that we can create a corps of excellent teachers by studying what excellent teachers do and then filling the schools with people who do that, too. (I like the part where she says that the problem with this plan becomes obvious if you take a moment to ask yourself why baseball teams don't just fill themselves up with .300 batters who are also great basemen and fielders.)

So, it's bad. What's Ravitch's solution?

Hell if I know. I do know she's a big fan of content and curriculum standards; she's a board member of the Core Knowledge Foundation, which advocates nationwide grade-based content standards. But beyond that, I don't know. The book concludes with a whole bunch of high-falutin' language, a veritable cascade of Glittering Generalities:

As a nation, we need a strong and vibrant public education system. As we seek to reform our schools, we must take care to do no harm. In fact, we must take care to make our schools once again the pride of the nation. Our public education system is a fundamental element of our democratic society. Our public schools have been the pathway to opportunity and a better life for generations of Americans, giving them the tools to fashion their own life and to improve the commonweal. To the extent that we strengthen them, we strengthen our democracy.

At the present time, public education is in peril. Efforts to reform public education are, ironically, diminishing its quality and endangering its very survival. We must turn our attention to improving the schools, infusing them with the substance of genuine learning and reviving the conditions that make learning possible.

I don't know about you, but I can't read that without picturing a waving flag and hearing some stirring martial music. But I still don't know what the heck Ravitch thinks the answer is. "Strong...vibrant...do no harm...pride of the nation...improve...infuse...revive." Got it! No problem! My friend Joann works in the field of school improvement; I'll send her those two paragraphs and she will thank me for making her job 100% easier.

*A little side note: Two years ago, I edited the annual report for the Michigan Legislature on the status of charter schools in Michigan. About a thousand pages of, "17% of students here versus 13% there on practically every measure possible. One of the things that rose up from that data that has stayed with me was that in Michigan, charter school students do about as well academically as their public school counterparts. The exception is African-American students in urban districts, who do somewhat better that AA kids in the public schools. I found it interesting.