Since the publication of her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, author Diane Ravitch has been both criticized and hailed for turning her back on the school "reform" movement. Some are congratulating her for returning to her "liberal" support for teacher's unions and her criticism of charter schools. Others are chastising her for being, as Eric Hanushek from the Hudson Institute puts it, too "nostalgic" in believing in an "old-fashioned view of education." As conservative education analyst Chester Finn puts it, she is being guided by "wishful thinking" and "unwarranted faith" in American public education. Still, others are just exasperated with her, such as Arthur Levine, a former president of Teachers College, who said, "She has done more than any one I can think of in America to drive home the message of accountability and charters and testing. Now for her to suddenly conclude that she's been all wrong is extraordinary - and not very helpful."
Count me in the exasperated camp.
In part one of this two-part diary, I argued that Ravitch's new book does indeed supply progressives with some excellent talking points for refuting the destructive education policies of the Obama administration. She quite correctly points out that the agenda of market-based reforms, choice, accountability, testing, and charter schools are "mistaken policies" that are "corrupting educational values." And as I emphasized in my diary, the fact that she has come to this realization, after so many years of cheerleading the ideas she now criticizes, gives progressives renewed leverage to dispute the prevailing trends of firing teachers and shuttering schools.
What Ravtich leaves to conjecture, however, is how she got things so wrong in the first place.
It's not like there has been no opposition to the NCLB-driven agenda of punishment by standardized test scores. She has been, I'm sure, quite aware of the opposing arguments being made by the late Gerald Bracey in 2003, by Alfie Kohn in 2002, and by Deborah Meir, the person who she now shares a blog with, in 2004.
What I argue in this diary is that the "U-turn" and "radical change of heart" that everyone attributes to Ravitch and her "new" views of school reform are in no way as dramatic as they seem. Actually, Ravitch doesn't go far enough in repudiating the "Washington Consensus" that continues to drive the federal government's education policy. Her acceptance of the need for standardized tests and her strong endorsement of a national curriculum follow the same command and control, top-down thinking of the education elites in DC. And she fails to bring out into the open the true motivations behind the reformists' agenda.
The Washington Consensus on school reform contends that public schools are both the cause of and solution for the widespread and profound social ills of racial and economic inequality and poverty. The WC sees schools as the reason why inequalities between races and economic classes exist because of their failure to "close the achievement gap" in our society. Schools are also blamed for "perpetuating poverty" because of their "reluctance to change." Yet, at the same time, schools are viewed by establishment thinkers as the chief means to eradicating the ills that they supposedly cause. Education, we are told again and again by business and community leaders and politicians on all sides, is the "key" to solving inequalities and poverty. But according to the WC, schools will take the required measures to overcome these social ills only when there is enough "external pressure and tough accountability" to make them "improve."
The creators of the WC are quite well known; they are prominent rightwing think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute, leading neoliberal organizations such as the Center for American Progress, and influential corporate groups such as The Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The thinking of the WC has been articulated in many documents that have been widely circulated.
As a long-standing member of the Washington Consensus on education, Ravitch has been openly supportive and friendly to that agenda, and freely admits so in her book. And although she now criticizes a significant part of that agenda - specifically choice, charter schools, and market "efficiencies" - she continues to uphold the intent of the WC by accepting standardized tests and endorsing a national curriculum.
As many progressive educators have long asserted, the standardized tests, that Ravitch calls "necessary," have become over emphasized to the point where they've gone from being "useful tools" to being the "hammer" used for nailing schools and educators with the "failure" label. All the way back in 2000, Alfie Kohn warned that standardized testing has "swelled and mutated, like a creature in one of those old horror movies, to the point that it now threatens to swallow our schools whole." He quotes the late Paul Wellstone, Senator from Minnesota, who said:
""Making students accountable for test scores works well on a bumper sticker, and it allows many politicians to look good by saying that they will not tolerate failure. But it represents a hollow promise. Far from improving education, high-stakes testing marks a major retreat from fairness, from accuracy, from quality, and from equity."
Imagine one of our political leaders of today saying that? Instead, as Deborah Meier points out, the mantra of standardized tests as a measurement of educational attainment continues to be the "deep assumption" on which our country rests its entire educational vision, a vision that must be rejected in favor of a system of measurements that "begins with teachers rather than with external measures that are imposed on them."
Another way that Diane Ravitch continues to uphold the Washington Consensus on education is by calling for a national curriculum. As Alfie Kohn accurately points out a national curriculum will undoubtedly be the product of "a relatively small group of experts . . . designing standards, test questions, and curricula for the rest of us based on their personal assumptions about what it means to be well educated." These standards will "inevitably be accompanied by a national standardized test" and calls for uniformity that do little to yield a beneficial education for kids. Instead of more uniformity and standards, what we nee, as Nel Noddings asserts "is a way to differentiate" education to the needs of kids who are not well served by a system bent on treating them like cogs in a machine.
Rather than repudiating the whole top-down agenda emanating from DC education elites, Ravitch calls for standards and assessments that will lead us down the same destructive path of NCLB. The only ones who ultimately benefit from what she proposes are the test makers, textbook publishers, and management consultants who are corrupting education. That Ravitch cant's see this - in fact she calls these charlatans "well meaning" - is a staggering shortcoming of her work and her vision for schools that can really work for the betterment of all children everywhere.
