Ravitch Offers A Counter Punch To Obama's Education Plan
Recently, I heard Diane Ravitch speak to 120 teacher unionists about her latest book The Death and Life of the Great American School System. She received a standing ovation before, during, and after her one-hour talk. This has become a common occurrence as she travels the country speaking to parents, teachers, and community leaders, more than 20,000 since February.
There are so many reasons one must read this book. It might be because it is quite rare for a book on education policy to appear on the New York Times Bestseller list. After only four months it is in its seventh reprinting. A writer from the Washington Post says that it "reads like a scary novel with a plot that drives you to keep turning the page." Ravitch more modestly explains that this popularity might be because as an historian she is able to explain the historical background of many current policies and initiatives and she enjoys writing for non-specialists, avoiding jargon whenever possible.
Or it might be because this 71 year old dynamo is willing to go where most historians, researchers, and policy makers fear to go— she takes on the wealthy corporate interests and well-connected philanthropic players, such as Gates, Walton, and Broad Foundations whom she claims have one agenda, which is the privatization of public schools. In the chapter, The Billionaire Boys Club, Ravitch offers an irrefutable case that "so much power and money are aligned against the neighborhood public school and education as a profession, public education itself is placed at risked". And she fears that President Obama is tied to these interests more than the casual observer realizes as his blueprint continues to push for charters, firing teachers, and increased testing, the precise agenda of privatization advocates.
Or it might be because one is really interested in why Ravitch, a former assistant secretary of education in the administration of President G.H.W. Bush and a vocal backer of the second President Bush's NCLB initiative, has philosophically reversed field. Previously, Ravitch was a mainstay in the conservative wing of the education world supporting choice, standards, and increased accountability though high stakes testing. Now, candidly admitting her mistake in judgment, Ravitch unflinchingly attacks policies that reflect business model approaches as the primary reform model. She writes, "The trouble with test-based accountability is that it imposes serious consequences on children, educators, and schools on the basis of scores that reflect measurement errors, statistical error, random variation, or a host of environmental factors or student attributes. None of us would want to be evaluated— with our reputation on the line— solely on the basis of an instrument that is prone to error and ambiguity."
Ravitch says that she changed her views because she has seen how the current wave of reforms is working out in reality. That is, teachers are not being treated as professionals, curriculum is being narrowed, and schools are being used as "society's all purpose punching bag". Finally, a prominent educational reformer has provided educators and families with a counter-narrative to the reforms that have placed public education in peril.