Diane Ravitch: on Education Reform
Yet irony abounded in what she said. Less than a decade ago, she was one of the “they” she denounced in her speech. For years, Ravitch supported many reform goals—accountability, school choice, charters. But now that the ideas she championed have taken effect she is dismayed by the results and has disavowed her previous positions. Her disillusionment has been slow and painful and has ended some old friendships, but, she asked me, “how many people actually admit that they’re wrong?”
.. Federal, state, and local spending on education comes to more than six hundred billion dollars a year, about the same amount that is spent on defense.
.. The slow accumulation of pension benefits—which keeps burnt-out teachers on the job for years—should be revised. Some believe that pay should even be “front-loaded,” with higher initial wages, to attract capable young people to the profession.
.. “American public schools as a whole are not failing,” she told me in Detroit. “High-school graduation rates are higher than ever”—up to 75.5 per cent, in 2009, the last year for which numbers are available. And she mentioned a slight increase, among all ethnic groups, in reading and math scores on national tests.
.. If you want people to be creative and entrepreneurial, forget the test scores. It’s character that makes success.” She added, “Testing doesn’t close gaps—it reveals them.” She is not against state tests per se, but she thinks that “testing should be used for help—to diagnose learning problems—not as a basis for rewards and punishments.
.. The reformers, Ravitch believes, are mistakenly imposing a free-market ethos of competition on an institution that, if it is to function well, requires coöperation, sharing, and mentoring.
.. At the same time, she defended tenure as important to academic freedom. “Without it, there will be huge parts of this country where evolution will never again be taught—or climate change, or anything that is in any way controversial.”
.. Ravitch points to low test scores in Southern states, where fewer teachers are unionized, and to states with high scores, like Connecticut, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, where schools are almost completely unionized.