Death And Life

Death And Life

Education
Ever since I read and reviewed Reign of Error last December I
have been fascinated by its author, Diane Ravitch, as well as sold on
her theories. In a lot of ways she is an unlikely defender of public
education against the forces of standardized testing and choice. As
she will tell you, she was once a Washington insider. "Having been
immersed in a world of true believers, I was influenced by their
ideas. I became persuaded that the business-minded thinkers were onto
something important. Their proposed reforms were meant to align
public education with the practices of modern, flexible, high
performance orgsnizations and to enable American education to make the
transition from the industrial to the postindustrial age." In other
words, her transformation from her Department of Education days to her
penning of what many of us struggling to save education from the
"reformers" consider almost a Bible is like...the Hamburgler and the
Colonel espousing the virtues of a vegan life style.
Ravitch is a prolific and eloquent writer. I decided to read
one of her older books to get some insight into her journey. Her 2010
The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing
and Choice Are Undermining Education (in which I found the quote
above) was just what I was seeking. In fact, for someone not sure
what is going on in education today or where she/he stands on current
issues this book should be read before her more recent volume.
Interestingly, Ravitch undertook the writing of this book as the
fortuitous result of deciding to have her office painted. In order to
do so, she had to relocate all her books and files. She used moving
them back as a time to sort through them and discard what she no
longer needed. She also gained a desire to look further into how her
thinking had evolved in regard to school reform. "Where once I had
been hopeful, even enthusiastic, about the potential benefits of
testing, accountability, choice, and markets, I now found myself
experiencing profound doubts about these same ideas. I was trying to
sort through the evidence about what was working and what was not...I
was trying to see my way through the blinding assumptions of ideology
and politics, including my own."
What she came up with was a real gem: an exquisite welding of
personal experience and research. The reader is invited to think
along with her. In the chapter on NCLB (No Child Left Behind), for
example, we are encouraged to ponder the impossibility of requiring
all children to be truly proficient in reading and math by a certain
year. She goes on to enumerate the consequences when schools face
severe penalties for being unable to achieve the impossible, many of
which are not immediately obvious. In other chapters she holds
concepts like accountability and choice up to similar scrutiny.
In my mind, this book is a must read for anyone concerned about
the future of education in America.
On a personal note, my first thought on hearing about NCLB when it
came into being was, "What the Hell?" I was sure the end result would
be a brain numbing focus on standardized test scores to the brutal
exclusion of anything else. As a school committee member, as every
year my district congratulated ourselves on making AYP (adequate
yearly progress) I would aggravate my peers by reminding them that the
ice berg (excuse overfondness for Titanic allusions) still loomed.
How, I would ask, will we make all our children proficcient by 2014?
To compare our standing with that of other systems and breathe a sigh
of relief rather than attacking the logic of the underlying regime
seemed to me to be merely rearranging deck chairs.
A great big shout out goes out to all who are striving to protect our
children and schools from the "reformers."
Julia Emily Hathaway


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