Having Kozol review Ravitch is like getting the gold ring. Which means someone at the NY Times Book Review has some sense. The NY Post has a Michelle Rhee clone do the review. I imagine there are different forces at work within the Times and I expect we will see a different type of review when the daily Arts section, usually Janet Maslin, review the book.
In the school wars I am reminded of The Terminator where robots are out to stamp out humans. There is no middle ground. Resist or be wiped out. So I find it amusing to hear calls for both sides to lay down their arms -- as if the real reform humans are on equal footing with the ed deform robots with all the power, money and weapons.
written by a charter school teacher ends lining up with the robot deformers ("can't we support "good" charters like KIPP?)". There was a recent article in the same magazine (I can't find the link right now) comparing books by Rhee and Ravitch -- as if it is conceivable there can be a middle ground between them. We have a better chance of finding middle ground with Korea. Or Iran.
By
JONATHAN KOZOL
Over the past 20 years, a rising tide of voices in the world of public
policy has been telling us that public education has fallen into an
abyss of mediocrity. Our schools are “broken,” the mantra goes.
Principals and teachers — their lack of “rigor” and “low expectations”
for their students — are the primary offenders. The problem can be
“fixed” only if schools are held to strict accountability. “No excuses”
are to be permitted.
The pressure intensified in 2002 with the enactment of the federal
testing law No Child Left Behind, which mandated high-stakes
standardized exams that were supposed to bring every child to
“proficiency” by the year 2014. When it grew apparent that this goal
would not be reached, privatizing leaders pounced, offering
business-modeled interventions as, perhaps, the only viable solution.
Prominent figures in financial circles and at large foundations became
interested in charter schools, encouraged their expansion and provided
grant support to some of them. Others, with less philanthropic motives,
saw a market opportunity and started running charter schools for profit.
What had been a slowly growing movement now became a juggernaut.
Diane Ravitch was for many years one of the strongest advocates for the
testing-and-accountability agenda. Because of her impeccable credentials
as a scholar and historian of education, she was a commanding presence
among critics of our schools. Some years ago, however, she reconsidered
her long-held beliefs and, in an influential book, “The Death and Life
of the Great American School System,” parted ways with her former allies
and joined the highly vocal opposition.
In her new book, “Reign of Error,” she arrows in more directly, and
polemically, on the privatization movement, which she calls a “hoax” and
a “danger” that has fed on the myth that schools are failing. Scores go
up and down from year to year — usually, as she explains, because the
testing instruments are changed and vary in their difficulty. But,
pointing to the National Assessment of Education Progress, which has
sampled math and reading scores every two years since 1992 and, in an
alternate version, every four years since the early 1970s, Ravitch
demonstrates that levels of achievement have been rising, incrementally
but steadily, from one decade to the next. And — surprise! — those
scores are now “at their highest point ever recorded.” Graduation rates
are also at their highest level, with more young people entering college
than at any time before.
Black and Hispanic children, nonetheless, continue to lag behind. The
black-white gap, as Ravitch documents, narrowed greatly in the era of
desegregation, but progress has slowed as the hyper-segregation of our
schools and neighborhoods along both racial and economic lines has come
to be accepted once again as the normal order of the day. Market
competition has not reduced the gap. Charter schools — Ravitch says we
ought to ban those that operate for profit — have an uneven record. They
“run the gamut from excellent to awful” and, on average, do no better
than their public counterparts. Those that claim impressive gains are
often openly or subtly selective in the children they enroll. Most do
not serve children with severe disabilities. Others are known to counsel
out or expel problematic students whose performance might depress the
scores.
What passes for reform today, Ravitch writes, is “a deliberate effort”
to replace public schools with a market system. The “unnatural focus on
testing” has produced “perverse but predictable results.” It has
narrowed curriculums to testable subjects, to the exclusion of the arts
and the full capaciousness of culture. And it has encouraged the
manipulation of scores on state exams. “Teaching to the test, once
considered unprofessional and unethical,” is now “common.”
All of this, she says, has continued unrelentingly under the
administration of President Obama, who has given “full-throated
Democratic endorsement” to “the longstanding Republican agenda.” The
president’s signature education package, Race to the Top, is “only
marginally different from No Child Left Behind.” In fact, it compounds
the damage by requiring that states evaluate teachers, partially at
least, on the basis of yearly gains in students’ scores — no matter if
the teacher has a different group of children from year to year, which
is usually the case, and no matter whether a teacher has more troubled
children, or more with disabilities, than another teacher who comes up
with higher scores.
In its funding practices, the White House has “abandoned equity as the
driving principle of federal aid,” offering new funds on condition that
states expand the scope of competition by opening more charter schools
and outsourcing normal functions of public schools to private agencies.
This, Ravitch says, is “the first time in history” the government has
“designed programs with the intent of stimulating private-sector
investors to create for-profit ventures in American education.”
Ravitch has her own ideas about how to elevate the quality of education.
Among her proposals: vastly expanded prekindergarten programs
introducing children to “the joyful pursuit of play and learning”; more
comprehensive medical and mental-health provisions (“every school should
have a nurse, a psychologist, a guidance counselor”); smaller classes
(like those in costly private schools); and diagnostic testing that,
unlike a standardized exam, shows us where a child needs specific help —
but, because it’s not judgmental, casts no cloud of anxiety over
learning.
In the long run, she puts her faith in teachers but wants to strengthen
the profession with higher entry standards. We can’t rely on
“enthusiastic amateurs” who teach short term, any more than we’d rely on
amateur physicians. She rejects stick-and-carrot incentives like merit
pay — “the idea that never works and never dies,” and that undermines
the spirit of collaboration by pitting teacher against teacher. She also
deplores humiliating practices like publishing teachers’ names beside
students’ test scores, as has been done in California and New York.
If we are to cast about for international comparisons, Ravitch urges us —
this is not a new suggestion but is, I think, a useful one — to take a
good, hard look at Finland, which operates one of the most successful
education systems in the world. Teachers there, after competing for
admission to schools of education and then receiving a superb course of
instruction, are “held in high regard” and “exercise broad autonomy.”
They are not judged by students’ test scores, because “there are no
scores.” The country has no charter schools and no “Teach for Finland.”
But, as Ravitch reminds us, there is one other, crucial difference:
“Less than 5 percent of children in Finland are growing up in poverty.”
In the United States, 23 percent do.
Again and again, she returns to this: “Our urban schools are in trouble
because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation,” which make for a
“toxic mix.” Public schooling in itself, she emphasizes, is “in a
crisis only so far as society is and only so far as this new narrative
of crisis has destabilized it.”
In her zeal to deconstruct that narrative, Ravitch takes on almost all
the well-known private-sector leaders and political officials — among
them Arne Duncan, Joel Klein, Bill Gates, Wendy Kopp and Michelle Rhee —
who have given their encouragement, or barrels of their money, to the
privatizing drive. It isn’t likely they’ll be sending her bouquets.
Those, on the other hand, who have grown increasingly alarmed at seeing
public education bartered off piece by piece, and seeing schools and
teachers thrown into a state of siege, will be grateful for this cri de coeur — a fearless book, a manifesto and a call to battle.
