RENOVATED RAVITCH'S NEW BOOK

Commentary on Diane Ravitch  

from Brother Dinizulu Tinnie

 

So miracles ARE possible!  Diane Ravitch has come around to embrace common sense.  Is this "intellectual honesty," as Wolfe asserts, or just more of the same, cranking out commentary that is critical of the status quo, as the marketplace of the times dictates. 

I suppose there are circles in which Ms. Ravitch's apparent conversion (as some might call it) will be taken seriously and as something to be celebrated.  They will suggest, as Professor Wolfe, does, that the decision-makers of the educational world should heed her advice and insights today (much the way the ideologues of yesteryear did, when she was putting forth ideas that made real educators cringe).
Personally, I might be counted among those useless cynics who just don't get excited about the slow progress of those whose on-the-job-training in life is gradually bringing them around to understanding what so many unheralded, un-credentialed, supposedly "uneducated" people have been knowing and saying for years.  (This critique of "choice" and testing certainly fits that profile.)

Cynicism aside, all constructive criticism is good, but it is only really good (in that it produces good results) if it serves to light the proverbial lamp rather than merely curse the darkness.  To write a book and make a name for oneself by criticizing failed policies, as a shift from criticizing those who criticized those same policies two decades ago, is OK, but it is still more necessary (and interesting) to discuss solutions rather than problems.  And the problem with education in this country is not a procedural one (should we rely on choice and testing or not?), but a much deeper-seated malaise that is at the root of defining what education is at all, and what its purpose should be.

Prof. Wolfe, making the most of this latest Ravitch opus and what it represents, implies that the answer to that question lies in imparting the kind of rigorous discipline and intellectual honesty that Ravitch herself is supposed to have benefited from in her own education, with one teacher.  (And the rest?  But that's another story...)   We might, in the spirit of honest intellectual inquiry, ask how integrated that school was, and how diverse was the student body who benefited from that teacher's inspiration.  Indeed, we might ask about that teacher's own upbringing and background.

To be almost ludicrously simple-minded about this, I will introduce an idea that I used to share with my community college students, partly as a reality check for us all, and partly as a way of letting them know how much I appreciated the decision and the effort they made to come to college at all.  (This was particularly the case with evening classes and more mature adults.)  What I pointed out to them is that education as we know it did not originate as something for regular folks who have to work jobs, cook meals, make beds, iron clothes, etc.  It was an elitist activity.  Libraries were in the homes of wealthy people who had servants and had time to read, and write, and exchange their intellectual observations with total open-mindedness except, arguably, if it came to questioning their own socio-political status.  Or, as Frederick Douglass observed most incisively in this context, of all the respected gentlemen who scientifically debate whether slavery is right or wrong, there is not a single one who would agree that slavery is right for HIM!

Any number of examples can be used to make the same point, which is that education functions very much to maintain the social status quo.  This, arguably, is universally human, but the question is whether the status quo in question is a system of traditions and values that challenge all human beings to do what they do best and to be the best at what they do, or one which is invested in maintaining unearned privileges for one segment of the population at the expense of another, or suppressing the opportunities of one segment of the population for the material (but not moral or spiritual) benefit of another, which is, I think it can be said fairly, what we are facing in the USA. 

What does America produce, really, in terms of both products and people?  It is not written anywhere in the Constitution that the purpose of the nation is to be a marketplace to make money for those who can best exploit it?  Yet, the prevailing myth and behavior has made capitalism is a virtual state religion, not to be questioned on any account, and money the equivalent of power and justice. 
So whatever it takes to have money is OK, if one succeeds. 

This has gotten so out of hand that education and health care are perceived to be rights of those with money while the rest are disposable or only need to be managed so as not to cause problems because of the problems that are being caused for them.  University education is no longer a quest for knowledge ("liberal arts" is all but a dead concept) but access to a network. 

The dream, as in plantation days, is to be among the brains while others do the hard work to make the dream come true.  (Today it is "globalized" sweat shops rather than plantations, as those forced-labor camps are still euphemistically called). "Success" is equated with the monetary "bottom line at the end of the day." 

I have on occasion offered a contrasting model, just for the sake of comparison, and to shine a light from a different direction on the issue.  The motto of the old Kingdom and modern State of Hawai'i translates roughly as, "The life of the land is perpetuated by righteousness."  Righteousness (which can mean a lot of things) is defined, in turn, by the Hula discipline, of which the dance is just the most outward expression: 

It is about having our relationship right with God, with Nature, and with the rest of Humanity.  It is practiced by practicing "doing the right thing, in the right way, in the right place, with the right people, at the right time, the first time." 

This is one example to illustrate what a journalist friend of mine once referred to as the difference between education in the US and elsewhere in the world.  "Elsewhere, the purpose of education is to learn how to live and live with.  In America it is to get a job and make money."  It is so much so that even the slightest questioning of that is dismissed as "impractical idealism" and therefore useless. 

Maybe the real question is how PUBLIC schools, which embody the very noble and sensible idea that ALL people need to be educated, got hijacked into this whole matrix of capitalism-as-religion, social-Darwinism, glorification of the rich and demeaning of the poor, etc. 
Part of the answer is the elephant in the room. 
History might objectively show that the last 500 years or so of human history have been a bold experiment in what the world would look like if it were run by the merchant-and-banker class, including the industrial and information revolutions, etc.  But there is a serious subjective factor which cannot be overlooked, which is the doctrine of "white supremacy" gone global. 

This is not an indictment of any "race" (there is only one human race anyway) or group of people, but it is a fact that this doctrine has served to entrench the cancer of greed, to justify hugely unhealthy disparities in health and well-being, to consume inordinate amounts of resources, in order to maintain an artificial and unnatural social order that can only be sustained by a regime of unrelenting violence and terrorism (either threatened or actual). 
The presumptive myth that "God" has somehow ordained one group genetically (not earned by any heroic effort) to rule and prey upon all others is at the heart of the present world order.  That it is accepted, promoted, justified, propagated, and sustained by many of the "best educated" minds should give us serious pause to consider what we mean by education in the first place, regardless of whether such low-level operational decisions as choice or testing is involved.

We have heard many times that the challenge for the American people in the 21st century is to "take our country back" from the few, the arrogant, and the greedy  -- the very foxes who design and maintain the henhouses into which we entrust our children for education. 
Renovated Ravitch is right, as Wolfe points out, in declaring that the charter school "solution" is not one.  After all, "until all of us are free, none of us is free," and that is still true.  It seems to me that the solution has to be in affirming the value of every human being, rather than debating how some, but not all, should be "educated" in dysfunctional schools with questionable purposes. 

Is it not interesting that in the present financial crisis, as school budgets get cut, the first thing to go are the arts programs -- the very ones which help each child to find his or her own voice and expression  -- because it is supposedly more important that they be drilled with facts and procedures that will make them, what?, "productive members of society" (sounds like the same thing they said as they unloaded the traumatized, emaciated survivors of the Middle Passage). 

Ravitch's new book might stir up a bit of a tempest in a teapot and might, most importantly, reap some profits for author and publisher, but a cynical view might see it as so much other inadequate research efforts to eradicate this or that disease because once the cure is found, there will be no more employment for the researchers.  Obviously, the books contributions are much more positive than that, however, and, if anything, Dr. Ravitch's opportunity to exercise research as an art form and a fulfilment of her personhood can be celebrated and appreciated as an example of the kind of opportunity that ALL children should have. 
Even those who disagree with its premise or question its motives will do well to be reminded of the African proverb, "When the fool speaks, the wise person listens."  At the very least, she has made a contribution to the discussion, as has Prof. Wolfe. If nothing else, it touched enough of a nerve fro me to stop what I needed to be doing to weigh in verbosely upon it, for whatever that might be worth. 

The problems to be solved and the solutions to be implemented won't happen overnight.  "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."  So we appreciate all forward steps along the path, recognizing that as we stagger toward health, there will be some sideways and backward steps as well, but these, too, have their purpose, and must be taken, for us to regain our balance and progress with our eyes on the prize.

That's the view form here.

DGT
Miami

VHVHVHVHVHVHVHVHVHVHVHVHVHVHVHVH

 

The Education of Diane Ravitch

Will and Deni McIntyre/Corbis

May 6, 2010-- nytimes.com
By ALAN WOLFE

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM

How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

By Diane Ravitch

283 pp. Basic Books. $26.95

Attending high school in Houston in the 1950s, Diane Ravitch came into contact with a teacher named Ruby Ratliff. A passionate lover of literature and a fierce editor of homework, Ratliff, following Tennyson, told Ravitch “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” The student evidently followed the teacher’s advice. Ravitch, a historian of American education and assistant secretary of education under the first George Bush, has long sought to find out what makes schools work. She has now found what that is, or at least what it isn’t: choice and testing. Her case against both is unyielding.

Ravitch was lucky to have Ratliff as her teacher — and we are lucky to have Ravitch as ours. Education was once considered purely a state and local matter. In the past 30 or so years it has become a national political football, with left and right fighting over various proposals, while nothing ever seems to get fixed. Meanwhile, many schools remain essentially segregated; how much you earn has a great deal to do with where you were educated; and even the best and brightest seem to know less geography and grapple with less history than when Ruby Ratliff discussed “Ozymandias” with her Houston class.

Ravitch’s offer to guide us through this mess comes with a catch: she has changed her mind. Once an advocate of choice and testing, in “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” she throws cold water on both. Along the way she casts a skeptical eye on the results claimed by such often-praised school reformers as New York’s Anthony Alvarado and San Diego’s Alan Bersin, reviews a sheaf of academic studies of school effectiveness and delivers the most damning criticism I have ever read of the role philanthropic institutions sometimes play in our society.

“Never before,” she writes of the Gates Foundation, was there an entity “that gave grants to almost every major think tank and advocacy group in the field of education, leaving no one willing to criticize its vast power and unchecked influence.”

The trouble all started, in her telling, with Milton Friedman, whose 1955 article “The Role of Government in Education” advocated the idea that parents should be given vouchers that would enable them to purchase schooling of their choice. In the Reagan administration, Friedman’s essay provided the rationale for efforts to promote what Secretary of Education William Bennett called the three C’s: content, character and choice. Before long, support for school choice became bipartisan when urban public officials, many of them black Democrats, saw in vouchers a way to give minority parents the same options available to middle-class families who could afford houses in desirable school districts.

Testing, as Ravitch shows, also has something of a trans-ideological intellectual history. Though conservatives historically opposed a strong federal role in education, in the 1990s they began looking with dismay at evidence that schools were failing and turned to the idea of national standards as a way to overcome the problem. Liberals, meanwhile, hoped to see more money made available to the schools, and if testing was the price to be paid to identify schools that were failing poor and minority children, so be it. No Child Left Behind, passed in the fall of 2001, seems to belong to another political century: Edward M. Kennedy, a firebrand liberal, and George W. Bush, a compassionate conservative, were equally proud of it.

Choice never fulfilled its promises, Ravitch argues, because its advocates spent more time talking about how education should be delivered than examining what education is. With so little effort devoted to the promotion of a sound curriculum, voucher schools, like those established in Milwaukee, turned out to offer few if any gains for those who attended them. As for charter schools, they have skimmed off the most motivated students without producing consistently better results than traditional public schools. She is skeptical of the charter movement’s free-market model of competition and choice.

“At the very time that the financial markets were collapsing, and as regulation of financial markets got a bad name,” Ravitch points out, “many of the leading voices in American education assured the public that the way to educational rejuvenation was through deregulation.” Instead of treating markets as a panacea, she argues, we should look at the data, the latest of which shows that charter schools as a whole do not do better than traditional schools. Given that result, we should be working harder to preserve the benefits of community and continuity that neighborhood schools offer.

Testing experienced much the same fate as vouchers. Knowing that their students would be tested and that the results would be used to evaluate which schools would be rewarded, educators began teaching to the tests, at the expense of sound curriculum.

But educational testing, Ravitch shows, is inexact, roughly the way public opinion polling is. Far from holding schools accountable, testing resulted in massive cynicism. Meanwhile the level of education received by many students remained “disastrously low.” Ravitch points to a 2009 study sponsored by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago showing that the increases in the performance of the city’s eighth graders in math and reading were due mostly to changes in testing procedures, and that in any case such gains evaporated by the time those students reached high school.

Some may ask whether we should trust someone who was once widely viewed as a conservative but now actually says nice things about teachers’ unions. But for all the attention paid to Ravitch’s change of heart, she has always been less an ideologue than a critic of educational fads, whether the more touchy-feely forms of progressive education popular in the 1960s and ’70s or the new nostrums of choice and testing. Ravitch now supports ideas associated with the left not because she is on the left. She does so for the simple reason that choice and testing had their chance and failed to deliver.

Ravitch ends with a call for a voluntary national curriculum, and believes that a consensus around better education is possible. On this point I do not share her optimism: parents who want creation science for their kids are not going to accept the teaching of evolution, and any push to establish common curriculum is likely to raise an outcry similar to that surrounding the 1994 history standards, drawn up by a panel of left-leaning historians and vociferously denounced by Lynne Cheney, the former chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other conservatives. (Ravitch writes that she was “disappointed” by the partisan nature of the standards, but “thought they could be fixed by editing.”)

I have always relied on Ravitch’s intellectual honesty when battles become intense. And her voice is especially important now. President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, seem determined to promote reforms relying on testing and choice, despite fresh data calling their benefits into question. I wish we could all share Ravitch’s open-mindedness in seeing what the data really tells us. Somehow, I doubt that’s what will carry the day.

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Alan Wolfe, a political scientist at Boston College, is writing a book about political evil.

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