NY Times: Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, (has made an) about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling.
Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical … discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education.
She once supported (No Child Left Behind) it, but now says its requirements for testing in math and reading have squeezed vital subjects like history and art out of classrooms.
Dr. Ravitch’s new posture has angered critics. “She has done more than any one I can think of in America to drive home the message of accountability and charters and testing,” said Arthur E. Levine, a former president of Teachers College. “Now for her to suddenly conclude that she’s been all wrong is extraordinary — and not very helpful.”
She rose to prominence in the 1970s with books defending the civic value of public schools from attacks by left-wing detractors, who were calling them capitalist tools to indoctrinate working-class children.
She had endorsed mayoral control of New York City schools … but by 2004 she had emerged as a fierce critic. In 2005, she said, a study she undertook of Pakistan’s weak and inequitable education system, dominated by private and religious institutions, convinced her that protecting the United States’ public schools was important to democracy.
She remembers … at a Washington conference she heard a dozen experts conclude that the No Child law was not raising student achievement. Charter schools, she concluded, were proving to be no better on average than regular schools, but in many cities were bleeding resources from the public system. Testing had become not just a way to measure student learning, but an end in itself. “Accountability, as written into federal law, was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools,” she writes. “The effort to upend American public education and replace it with something that was market-based began to feel too radical for me.”
She told school superintendents at a convention … that the United States’ educational policies were ill-conceived, compared with those in nations with the best-performing schools. “Nations like Finland and Japan seek out the best college graduates for teaching positions, prepare them well, pay them well and treat them with respect,” she said. “They make sure that all their students study the arts, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages, the sciences and other subjects. They do this because this is the way to ensure good education. We’re on the wrong track.”
In response, I found this odd conservative perspective in support of Dr. Ravitch, based on the idea that public schools are already part of our system of free market choices.
Austin Bramwell, American Conservative: Diane Ravitch’s about face on school “accountability” (and vouchers) — which favors charter schools, vouchers and standardized testing, as well as demotion of teachers and administrators who fail to achieve set criteria — is interesting, in the way that ideological conversions often are. With due respect to Dr. Ravitch … “school accountability” is a misnomer. Public schools are now and always have been accountable. The so-called “accountability” movement only wants to make them less so.
As every schoolchild likes to say, America is a free country. That is, parents have the right to settle in whatever school district they choose. Predictably, therefore, those families willing to pay the most … gravitate to the best schools, the “price” of which is reflected in the cost of real estate and local property taxes … So long as Americans enjoy freedom of movement, supply and demand will always tend to produce a huge gap between successful and failing schools.
The “accountability” movement, in short, wants to equalize the quality of educational products, no matter the price paid for them. Whatever the merits of this policy, it surely does not show much faith in the free market.
…there is a hidden mechanism that makes the American School System work, and which modern planners ignore — namely, freedom of movement, which creates a well-functioning market for public education. Dr. Ravitch … seems to believe that everyone is entitled to a good education no matter how little she is willing to pay for it.
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