Brown Book Loft Blog

While their focus, which Ravitch unrelentingly documents, has been on operational and organizational reforms (from choice and charters to testing and merit pay) they’ve been blind to what really determines whether students are learning or not: the content of what they are being taught. “It’s the Curriculum, Stupid” could be another name for this mandatory book. Perhaps most impressive, though, is the portion of the book in which Ravitch takes on those she dubs “The Billionaire Boys’ Club”. She argues that organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation sometimes do more harm than good for the schools they are attempting to save. Listen to this wise woman. Do not listen to her defamers, who give her such silly and untrue motives for admitting she was wrong and taking a stand.

And by the way, does anyone think a nation can be defended by a citizen militia with private gunboats to protect the coast? No modern nation could defend itself on that basis.

I feel empowered by what I learned from Dianne Ravitch, am invigorated to read more widely about education policy and to become an active advocate for real improvement in our public schools – and not just higher scores on standardized tests. Dianne Ravitch was instrumental in formulating and implementing No Child Left Behind but has now realized we have failed a generation of children by how this emphasis on Accountability and Testing was “corrupted” (her word).

Ravitch has served in the field of education during the reign of three different Presidents. She was committed to NCLB and high stakes testing in the past but over the last three as the negative findings became public she now rejects both.

In addition, schools are tasked with also teaching children social skills, the arts, and democracy, yet these are not ever assessed formally. Most teachers teach so much more than Math and Reading, yet we are solely to be judges on these criteria. The charter school movement essentially provides no benefit to the majority of students. This book is a “must read” for anyone interested in the future of American education.

All professors I have talked to, from very conservative to very liberal, agree this problem has grown a lot in recent years. Lynne Munson Diane Ravitch’s well-researched, thought-provoking, and impassioned plea for an examination of current education reforms is a must-read for anyone who is concerned about the present state and future of education in the United States. What makes it all the more remarkable is that Ravitch was part of George W Bush’s administration and had an active role in his educational agenda and the development of the No Child Left Behind legislation.

Most of the reforms are designed to break teacher power. Surely no one seriously believes we can attract better teachers by slashing teachers’ pay, destroying job security, and subjecting teachers to top-down control and arbitrary firing.

I visited one of them a few days ago. All of the windows were sealed shut and the air was stale. It won’t be fixed overnight. But if we stick with a back to basics approach, saturated with the solid American democratic values that Dr Ravitch advocates, we won’t be so prone to fall for the silver bullets that never seem to find their mark. Why continue down this road when the results we have up to this point show that it has not led us closer to where we want to be? This is exactly what Obama has done with his approach to education. In pursuit of better scores, hundreds of instructional hours each year are diverted from history, social studies, science, the arts, and physical education to test preparation. NCLB has not been the only factor undermining our schools, Ravitch writes.

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. BUDGET WINDSCREENS.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 give explicit examples of how this new focus on reform played out in several noted districts in the United States. Ultimately, these stories do not have happy endings.

May those days return soon! It is always refreshing to hear when someone admits she was wrong – especially when she is considered one of the most knowledgeable in her field.

Here is a truly frightening true story: A local superintendent was having a frank conversation with a teacher regarding budget cuts. In an age when more than a third of Americans cannot pass the basic citizenship test required of those seeking US citizenship, this superintendent called history and social teachers a waste of faculty parking spaces.

She notes that the Obama administration is linking increases in federal funding to mandated adoption by other districts of the same programs that have already failed Mr Duncan and the children of Chicago. Teacher-bashing, so in vogue among the “reformers” dominating the national discussion, is rejected by Dr Ravitch. In fact many Charter Schools can be models and are quite scalable. Many schools do just that with similar results. So in trying to improve a school we often dynamite the highest achieving classes. That makes no sense. I hope that this book will help turn the tide against high stakes testing. Our current administration should read this book. NCLB was not a continuation of the reforms launched by A Nation at Risk, but a dangerous diversion. That transformational moment came at a conference of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, where “a dozen or so scholars” agreed that school choice, one of the principal instruments of the “NCLB toolkit,” was not working. I agree with the author that charter schools are a mixed bag. Arne Duncan opened many charter schools in Chicago.

It is charged with terrific emotion, not in the words themselves but through the conclusions that it drives home to the discerning reader through her always palpable expertise and almost conversational narrative style. Ravitch’s latest book is magnificent.

Using test scores alone to judge which schools are improving or slipping is dangerous. Likewise it is impossible to identify effective teachers by their students’ performance on a set of tests that emphasize reading and math techniques over content and understanding. This lady speaks the truth, without regard to politics, a true rarity in this day and age. A wake up call that is, unfortunately, probably too late. In fact, these things have virtually no positive impact at all as far as I can tell. Standards and curriculum that aren’t driven by tests, teachers who are free to teach the curriculum and hold students to account for the material, and administrations who ensure the curriculum is being taught. The difficulty lies not in the models, but in the interests arrayed against reform. From time to time she refers to some of these interests. Several theories of criminology, the learning theories, state that delinquency is the result of close proximity to other delinquent peers in combination with a lack of norms and definitions that favor conventional behavior. Taking the learning theory of delinquency into account, separating “good” students from struggling students may increase the rate of delinquency instead of helping it.

Mandates required us to spend our time on irrelevant tasks and proving that we were doing what we were already doing. Cheap Pavers.

Her writing is clearer and cleaner than any crystal. It is grandly informative and lucid and solidly persuasive. For certain, there are no magic feathers that enable elephants to fly.” Through fascinating analyses, narratives, interviews, and descriptions, Ravitch shows how our education reformers miss the mark again and again. With precision and soul, Diane Ravitch shows why our present-day education reforms are likely to do more harm than good: they are based on ideas extraneous to education and too often ignore its content. Closure, breakup, privatization of schools, rigid pedagogical models, teacher evaluations based on test scores–none of these reforms addresses why and what we are teaching in the first place.

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.

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.

However, chapter 10 was the most interesting to me. Ravitch discusses the impact foundation funding has on the national education agenda.

Thank you Ms Ravitch! This is an excellent book that should be read by anyone who is concerned about the plight of the American school system, as well as for those who are uninformed about current problems and those that yet may come as a result of decisions made during the Bush administration. How could the unions be responsible for so much failure when, she asks, traditionally, the highest scores in the nation are posted by strong union states such as Massachusetts (best results in the nation) and the lowest scores in the south, where unions are weak or non-existent? The mania for closing “failing” schools also comes under the Ravitch microscope.

Ravitch not only explains how we got where we are, but paints a picture of where we’re headed, based on real data trends. Don’t miss the chapter on how philanthropy in education (a la Gates & Walton Foundations) is driving public policy, not the other way around. This is the true legacy of NCLB. As for the charter schools, the rage of the moment, like parasites they live at the expense of the public schools they pillage for desirable students.

If you want to know why teachers are enraged, read this book. If you want to know what’s most likely going on in your child’s classroom – not real learning, not critical thinking skills, no time for discussions, no recess, no time for science and social studies because under NCLB, these subjects are not tested – read this book and then take action.

I consider them a challenge and I consider it my duty to try to give these students the best quality education I can. But I am not a miracle worker. 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. However, I fear it is too little too late. Our public schools (and the teaching profession) may die the same death other jobs have died in the course 30 years of ideologically driven national suicide. Before we go any further with Race to the Top, please read this book. A broad, liberal arts curriculum is what’s truly needed, but apparently it is nowhere to be found; it is too controversial in these contentious times.

Ms Ravitch mentions occasionally that resources are necessary to improve schools. cheap landscaping.