Brown Book Loft Blog

Most people pick up a newspaper, watch a news program on TV, or listen to friends talk about this, and find the education debate mind-numbing and impossible to understand. If you want to know the what, why, and true meaning behind the issues in K-12 education today, this is the book you must read.

Her arguments are generally well-reasoned and data-informed, which makes them important and insightful. She rightly notes that NCLB has created a combination of unreachable goals and perverse incentives that have frequently derailed the ultimate goal of improving student learning. The US DOE’s Race to the Top initiative requirement that a state greatly increase the number of charter schools should be rethought. As the author points out, the reforms of the last 20 years have focused on testing, choice and structures instead of focusing on the heart of education – what is taught and how it is taught.

But the reality that those 300 AP scholars are not merely proficient but far, far above state standards (ten times as much twenty times as much). On the AYP’s AP students are counted as just competent students.

But history is not just the distant past, but the news of yesterday as well. By putting events, still fresh in our memories, into relevant context, Dr Ravitch demonstrated their importance in the larger historical context and made her reputation. All professors I have talked to, from very conservative to very liberal, agree this problem has grown a lot in recent years. I fear that if we continue down the current road, my students will not have access to a diverse, inspiring, rigorous education – they will be put in a compliance testing camp and will just drop out, rather than graduate. This would be a tragedy.

Diane has always been a supporter of standards; and as a public school teacher so am I. Ravitch is also not afraid to state the obvious: the temptation for schools, teachers and administrators to game the system or cheat is sometimes overwhelming. While there I was exposed to works by Ayn Rand, Tom Sowell, and a host of other free-market thinkers, and I found myself largely convinced by their arguments. As graduation approached I wrote my thesis on free-market reforms in public education, taking the radical stance that public education was a failed experiment that should be abandoned.

Tax cutting is also involved here; steady pressure to reduce taxes, and to cut education spending as the first line of doing so, is obvious, but less obvious is the degree to which it lies behind the reforms. Most of them are about saving money, not about helping kids.

There are schools, even whole countries that beat the odds in educating children. Their students perform far better than those with similar demographics. And while I hope you will read it if you are involved in or have any interest in education, I really wish people like Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, and 50 governors of a state near you would read it, too. The juggernaut we are presently on has to be slowed down before it can be stopped, after all. My thoughts were confirmed by a members of my book group who were new to the topic or engaged in schooling in an area that isn’t in the thick of the arguments (pre-school and after school programs). These solutions are either founded on faulty data, skewed by corporate influence, or impractical (if not impossible) to take to scale. Instead we teach to the tests, reprimand teachers by means of bureaucratic, inconsistent standards, and use the public schools as a dumping ground for those who are left behind, skewing the statistics of charter schools. Instead of a boxing match of ideas that motivates students to think clearly and critically, Diane Ravitch paints a picture akin to professional wrestling where it is the children who take the fall. They also happened to be concepts very popular with me: teacher pay linked to performance, charter schools, consequences for schools, teachers, principals if they don’t meet performance goals, data driven education based on test scores. Ravitch is neither a reactionary, nor a radical.

Her information is great. DYNAMIC AIR FILTER.