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.

The first education is the practical one we all need that teaches us what we need to make a living -most of us have to make a living. The second education we need is the other education, the “true education” that which teaches us how to live our lives more fully by teaching us to think AND to appreciate the “Good Life”. Ravitch provides an alarming look at how these rich and powerful foundations sometimes use their clout to promote their own agendas and philosophies of education. Why is this allowed to happen?

I transferred to the high school about that time. All we did was dance to the state department of education’s interpretation of NCLB – many false starts, much wasted time.

First, doctors would find ways of lowering temperatures (alcohol rubs, etc.) without improving underlying conditions. But even if temperature figures were not to get gamed in this way, any improvement in fever scores could not reasonably be interpreted as improvement in the overall health of the patients.

As a student, she felt that her teacher was wonderful and in retrospect she suspects that Mrs Ratliff would not have been as great if she was under all of the regulations and assessments that teachers under NCLB must endure. Teacher accountability is extremely important, but measuring that accountability should not sacrifice the quality of actual learning that occurs in the classroom. This book has the right criticisms and the right solutions, and just might pull us out. The worst effect of the tests and the No Child Left Behind nightmare is that students now often cheat and see nothing wrong with it.

Ravitch also describes the charter school movement, which began with great promise and intent. Shanker envisioned schools run by teachers using only innovative ideas and sharing ideas that worked with other schools.

As Ravitch says on page 223, “The nature of our education system–whether mediocre or excellent – will influence society far into the future.” Considering the initiatives currently being pushed by President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan, Ravitch’s words couldn’t be truer. This work altered my life. I quit my public school job and took a teaching job in a parochial high school.

Diane Ravitch is the preeminent education historian in the United States, and believe it or not, she is no academic, for she has lived through these issues at the highest levels of the United States Department of Education and other places that are very much at the heart of K-12 education in America. Diane presents the education debates and issues of our times in an easy to digest, well- documented, first-hand account. All then would understand the fallacies of NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND (NCLB), the worst piece of legislation ever created in the history of American education, as well as the problems that arise from high stakes testing. It’s all in the book; all they have to do is read. In fact many Charter Schools can be models and are quite scalable. Many schools do just that with similar results. I do not recall her bringing up the fact that this country pays more than most for public schools. Her citations from studies on Charter Schools are sometimes a bit selective. Ravitch laments that the charters are not serving as experimental labs to help public schools by trying new ideas. Instead, they are competing with and even cannibalizing the public schools as if it is a cut throat business model of competition. In reviewing Ravitch’s latest book I am handicapped by my deep and richly earned veneration of her intellect and her character. If I seem to be “hero-worshipping” her, then my credibility as a critic may suffer.

And she makes many very strong arguments (but unfortunately, without much persuasive evidence or data). Generator Enclosure.