| THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education Diane Ravitch New York: Basic Books, March 2010 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-465-01491-0 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-465-01491-7 | 283pp. | HC | $26.95 | |
Diane Ravitch has long been an observer of the American educational system as well as a participant in it. She wrote perhaps the definitive history of this country's efforts to reform that system.1 In this, her twelfth book, Diane Ravitch explores the changes in perception regarding education she has undergone over the years. It is in part her confession to being influenced by conservative ideology during the time she spent as head of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement under Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander.
"Like many others in that era, I was attracted to the idea that the market would unleash innovation and bring greater efficiencies to education. I was certainly influenced by the ideology of other top-level officials in the first Bush administration, who were strong supporters of school choice and competition. But of equal importance, I believe, I began to think like a policymaker, especially a federal policymaker. That meant, in the words of a book by James C. Scott that I later read and admired, I began 'seeing like a state,' looking at schools and teachers and students from an altitude of 20,000 feet and seeing them as objects to be moved around by big ideas and great plans." – Page 10 |
In making that confession, Ms. Ravitch reaffirms her longtime understanding that effective education demands above all a core curriculum designed to provide a solid grounding in all the skills and knowledge necessary for success in citizenship and employment. Unfortunately, as she thoroughly documents, the last thing the reformers she describes in these pages cared about was a curriculum.
Following the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, the federal Department of Education provided money to the states for the development of voluntary national standards for curricula in various subjects. This effort collapsed in the fall of 1994 when Lynne Cheney attacked the history standards (then unreleased) for bias.2 The bitter disputes that ensued had a chilling effect, and thereafter most states' proposed standards were pabulum.
"The standards movement died in 1995, when the controversy over the national history standards came to a high boil. And the state standards created as a substitute for national standards steered clear of curriculum content. So, with a few honorable exceptions, the states wrote and published vague documents and called them standards. Teachers continued to rely on their textbooks to determine what to teach and test. The test and textbooks, written for students across the nation, provided a low-level sort of national standard. Business leaders continued to grouse that they had to spend large amounts of money to train new workers; the media continued to highlight the mediocre performance of American students on international tests; and colleges continued to report that about a third of their freshmen needed remediation in the basic skills of reading, writing, and mathematics." – Page 20 |
Using recent developments in New York City's District 2 and subsequently in San Diego as examples, she thoroughly documents the shortcomings of the autocratic prescription of test scores as the sole measure of educational success. Then she turns to No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the nation-wide law that took effect in January 2002. This has identical shortcomings. Chief among them is that it replaces learning with scoring.
"Tests should follow the curriculum. They should be based on the curriculum. They should not replace it or precede it. Students need a coherent foundation of knowledge and skills that grows stronger each year. Knowledge and skills are both important, as is learning to think, debate, and question. A well-educated person has a well-furnished mind, shaped by reading and thinking about history, science, literature, the arts, and politics. The well-educated person has learned how to explain ideas and listen respectfully to others." – Page 16 |
Closely related is the defect that failure to improve students' scores enough year to year brings punishment to the school. In the worst case, the school is shut down and the students shipped elsewhere. As Diane Ravitch points out, this is the replacement of positive accountability with punitive accountability. NCLB is all stick and no carrot. The natural result is that administrators and teachers concentrate on raising their school's numbers at the expense of all else. Also natural is that their methods are frequently meretricious.3
In 1967, officials at the Ford Foundation decided to take an active role in reforming education. In conjunction with the Carnegie Corporation, they not only contributed money but undertook to organize demonstration projects in three small New York City school districts. (Carnegie, leery of controversy like most foundations, withdrew after doing preliminary research. Diane Ravitch was employed by the Carnegie Corporation during part of that time to do some of that preliminary research. Here she documents the debacle that ensued — and what a debacle it was.) Notwithstanding the emnity that flowed from Ford's misguided effort, in 1993 publishing magnate Walter Annenberg pledged his considerable resources to improving education via challenge grants in eighteen cities. The Annenberg challenge also achieved little improvement. Now, a number of new foundations including the one established by Ray Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, have joined the fray. Chapter 10, "The Billionaire Boys' Club," examines these programs, concentrating on efforts by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. Despite their commitment of enormous resources, they too have done little to improve education, as a series of independent analyses shows. Their most noteworthy results may be the persistence with which they proclaimed success and the mildness with which they were treated by the mainstream press.
Finally, in Chapter 11, "Lessons Learned," the author sums up her extensive examination. I think it is fair to say that the chapter title is a bit of a misnomer, in that there is no indication that the subjects of her examination have learned anything from their failures. She, on the other hand, shows us that she learned a great many things. Unfortunately, these things only confirmed what she already knew. So perhaps a better title for this chapter would have been "Lessons Re-learned." But this chapter is a valuable summation of the book. It reiterates what most every parent knows intuitively, even if they lack the wherewithal to put that knowledge into practice: that effective education is hard to achieve; that it demands long-term commitments by parents and governments as well as educators; and that achieving it is vital to the future of both today's students and the communities they will form in the future.
Several ingredients must go into building a system that reliably delivers good education. On page 224, Diane Ravitch quotes a checklist of those essential ingredients: "a strong curriculum; experienced teachers; effective instruction; willing students; adequate resources; and a community that values education." But the keystone for the whole endeavor is a coherent curriculum, as the nations that do the best job of educating their children consistently show us. Since the middle of the twentieth century, America has consistently lacked that keystone. Instead of adopting guidelines for what to teach, those purporting to reform our system have focused on how to teach. And, as Diane Ravitch has consistently shown with her books, that approach has not gotten the results they (and we) claim to want. That is not the only shortcoming of our current system, but it is a major one. Will things get better? The prospects appear dim.
As before, with her other books, Diane Ravitch is nearly letter-perfect in the areas of spelling and grammar. Also she is meticulous about citing sources in chapter-by-chapter endnotes, and she provides an excellent index. One rule of writing she forgets at least once is to expand acronyms the first time they appear in the text. A glossary of these would have been helpful.4 I consider that lack the only substantial defect in this book. I try to correct it with the table below.
| AAAS | American Association for the Advancement of Science | AASA | American Association of School Administrators |
| ACLU | American Civil Liberties Union | AEI | American Enterprise Institute (a conservative think-tank in Washington, DC) |
| AFT | American Federation of Teachers (a teachers' union serving mostly urban districts) | AIR | American Institutes for Research |
| AYP | Adequate Yearly Progress | CAP | Center for American Progress (a progressive think tank) |
| CCSA | California Charter Schools Association | NAEP | National Assessment of Educational Progress (the yearly federal tests of reading and math) |
| NCLB | No Child Left Behind (the program for improving education by testing) | NEA | National Education Association (the largest teachers' union) |
| SES | Supplementary Educational Services (free tutoring) | SINI | School In Need of Improvement |
| SURR | School Under Regulatory Review | TPS | Traditional Public School(s) |
| UFT | United Federation of Teachers (organizing the teachers in New York City) | VAA | Value Added Assessment (a statistical method more sophisticated than NCLB, measuring individual students' achievement year-to-year) |
The book is well organized and easy to read. I give it full marks, consider it a keeper, and recommend it to anyone concerned about educating future generations of Americans.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.