Re: [xmca] Fwd: Diane Ravitch, Chester Finn, & Mark Kleiman on school "reform" and charter schools

[Helen Grimmett <helen.grimmett@education.monash.edu.au>]

Hi Andy,

How do we send this to Julia Gillard (the Australian Federal Minister
for Education and Deputy Prime Minister, for international folk)? I
cannot understand why Australia would want to follow in the path of the
US and the UK and fail to learn from their mistakes! My head is getting
sore from all this brick wall beating.

Helen

----- Original Message -----
From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
Date: Wednesday, March 10, 2010 12:18 pm
Subject: Re: [xmca] Fwd: Diane Ravitch, Chester Finn, & Mark Kleiman
on school	"reform" and charter schools
To: lchcmike@gmail.com, "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity"
<xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>

> It *is* gratifying, isn't it, when a right-wing head banger 
> discovers the bleeding obvious, even after they have ruined 
> thousands of lives. It does help. And I am intrigued by the 
> title of her book which is an allusion to Jane Jacobs' 
> wonderful book on intelligent design ... of cities. 
> Intrigued also by the kinds of experiences that changed her 
> mind.
> 
> Andy
> 
> mike cole wrote:
> > If you have not caught up with this story, its well worth reading.
> > mike
> > 
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > From: Jeff Weintraub <jweintra@gmail.com>
> > Date: Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 12:16 PM
> > Subject: Diane Ravitch, Chester Finn, & Mark Kleiman on school 
> "reform" and
> > charter schools
> > To:
> > 
> > 
> >  *Diane Ravitch, Chester Finn, & Mark Kleiman on school "reform" 
> and charter
> > schools*<http://jeffweintraub.blogspot.com/2010/03/diane-ravitch-
> chester-finn-mark-kleiman.html>
> > 
> > The big story here is the way that current debates over school 
> reform have
> > been shaken up by the recent arguments of Diane Ravitch, who has 
> long been a
> > major voice on these issues. Ravitch has decided that many 
> policies of which
> > she used to be a strong and influential supporter have turned 
> out, on the
> > basis of experience, to be bad ideas. A *New York Times*
> > 
>
article<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/education/03ravitch.html?scp=1&sq=ravitch&st=cse>about>
this last week opened as follows:
> > 
> > Diane 
>
Ravitch<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/diane_ravitch/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
> > the education historian who built her intellectual reputation 
> battling> progressive educators and served in the first Bush 
> administration’s> Education Department, is in the final stages of 
> an astonishing, slow-motion
> > about-face on almost every stand she once took on American 
> schooling.> 
> > Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter 
> schools and
> > free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically 
> critical.> She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, 
> discovering that these
> > strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining 
> public> education. She resigned last year from the boards of two 
> conservative> research groups.
> > 
> > “School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the 
> tracks> saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ ” Dr. Ravitch said in 
> an interview.
> > 
> > Dr. Ravitch is one of the most influential education scholars of 
> recent> decades, and her turnaround has become the buzz of school 
> policy circles. *
> > [....]*
> > 
> > Among the topics on which Dr. Ravitch has reversed her views is 
> the main
> > federal law on public schools, No Child Left
> > 
>
Behind<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/n/no_child_left_behind_act/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>,
> > which is up for a rewrite in coming weeks in Congress. She once 
> supported> it, but now says its requirements for testing in math 
> and reading have
> > squeezed vital subjects like history and art out of classrooms. 
> *[....]*> 
> > The rest of the article does a good job of spelling things out, 
> so it's
> > worth reading in
> > 
>
full<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/education/03ravitch.html?scp=1&sq=ravitch&st=cse>.>
Some highlights:
> > 
> > In her new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School 
> System,”> she describes the bipartisan consensus that took root in 
> the early 1990s,
> > with her support, and has held sway since.
> > 
> > “The new thinking saw the public school system as obsolete, 
> because it is
> > controlled by the government,” she writes. “I argued that certain 
> managerial> and structural changes — that is, choice, charters, 
> merit pay and
> > accountability — would help to reform our schools.”
> > 
> > It might be noted, incidentally, that this agenda combined two 
> elements that
> > should, in principle, have seemed in tension. For public schools, 
> the> emphasis was on tightening up top-down administrative control and
> > rationalization, with increasing systemic centralization and the 
> imposition> and enforcement of uniform standards and 
> "accountability" by city and state
> > governments and, eventually, from Washington. For non-public 
> schools, and
> > semi-public hybrids like charter schools, the idea was to use 
> government> funds (though vouchers and other devices) to provide 
> increased "choice" and
> > "diversity," an approach framed and justified by a rhetoric of 
> market-like
> > competition. Of course, even though there's an obvious tension 
> between these
> > two sets of themes, they might be complementary in practice. But 
> what's> striking is that most proponents of this agenda, as well as 
> most outside
> > analysts I have read, didn't even seem to notice that there *was* 
> any> tension or potential inconsistency here.
> > 
> > In January 2001, Dr. Ravitch was at the White House to hear 
> President George
> > W. Bush outline his vision for No Child Left Behind, which 
> Congress approved
> > with bipartisan majorities and which became law in 2002.
> > 
> > “It sounded terrific,” she recalled in the interview.
> > 
> > However, doubts and disillusionments gradually accumulated. Among 
> others:> 
> > In 2005, she said, a study she undertook of Pakistan’s weak and 
> inequitable> education system, dominated by private and religious 
> institutions, convinced
> > her that protecting the United States’ public schools was 
> important to
> > democracy.
> > 
> > She remembers another date, Nov. 30, 2006, when at a Washington 
> conference> she heard a dozen experts conclude that the No Child 
> law was not raising
> > student achievement.
> > 
> > These and other experiences left her increasingly disaffected 
> from the
> > choice and accountability movements. Charter schools, she 
> concluded, were
> > proving to be no better on average than regular schools, but in 
> many cities
> > were bleeding resources from the public system. Testing had 
> become not just
> > a way to measure student learning, but an end in itself.
> > 
> > And so on. These passages, it seems to me, zero in on the key 
> thread of
> > continuity running through her positions over time:
> > 
> > Admirers say she is returning to her roots as an advocate for public
> > education. She rose to prominence in the 1970s with books 
> defending the
> > civic value of public schools from attacks by left-wing 
> detractors, who were
> > calling them capitalist tools to indoctrinate working-class 
> children.> 
> > “First she angered the Marxist historians, and later the fans of 
> progressive> education and the multiculturalists,” said Jeffrey E. 
> Mirel, a professor of
> > education and history at the University of Michigan. “But she’s 
> always> defended public schools and a robust traditional 
> curriculum, because she
> > believes they’ve been a ladder of social mobility.” *[....]*
> > 
> > She told school superintendents at a convention in Phoenix last 
> month that
> > the United States’ educational policies were ill-conceived, 
> compared with
> > those in nations with the best-performing schools.
> > 
> > “Nations like Finland and Japan seek out the best college 
> graduates for
> > teaching positions, prepare them well, pay them well and treat 
> them with
> > respect,” she said. “They make sure that all their students study 
> the arts,
> > history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages, the 
> sciences and
> > other subjects. They do this because this is the way to ensure good
> > education. We’re on the wrong track."
> > 
> > Basically, all that sounds pretty good to me. And Ravitch is 
> someone whose
> > views on education have always deserved great respect, whether or 
> not one
> > fully agreed with them. But the issues involved here are complex and
> > difficult as well as very important, so rather than trying to 
> pursue them
> > further now, I'll put that off to another occasion.
> > 
> > =>Meanwhile, we can treat the foregoing as background and 
> introduction to
> > the following (characteristically perceptive) item from Mark
> > Kleiman<http://www.samefacts.com/2010/03/uncategorized/chester-
> finn-on-charter-schools/>
> > .
> > 
> > Reading a rejoinder to Diane Ravitch by one of her former
> > comrades-in-arms, Chester
> > Finn <http://www.hoover.org/bios/finn.html>, Mark picked up on a 
> very> interesting and probably very significant point. See below, 
> and ponder.
> > 
> > --Jeff Weintraub
> > 
> > ==============================
> > *Mark Kleiman (The Reality-Based Community)*
> > March 4, 2010
> > *Chester Finn on charter
> > schools<http://www.samefacts.com/2010/03/uncategorized/chester-
> finn-on-charter-schools/>
> > *
> > 
> > Chester Finn isn’t happy with Diane Ravitch’s apostasy from the 
> conservative> vision of “school reform,” but he makes a fascinating 
> point about charter
> > schools<http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-
> end-of-the-education-debate>:
> > 
> > 
> > Not all charters are created equal. The quality of the schools 
> fluctuates> widely by state. (Our ability even to evaluate charters 
> varies greatly, too,
> > depending on who performs the evaluations, what methods they use, 
> and which
> > schools they examine.) A few jurisdictions — Massachusetts, New 
> York,> Illinois — are sparing in their distribution of charter 
> contracts and, for
> > the most part, check carefully to determine whether organizations 
> that get
> > the green light have what it takes to succeed. As a result, these 
> states> have relatively few charter schools, but their performance 
> is impressive.
> > Meanwhile, states like Arizona, Ohio, Texas, and California 
> confer charters
> > on nearly everyone who applies; as a consequence, they now have 
> many charter
> > schools but also wide discrepancies in charter quality and 
> performance> (tending, however, toward the mediocre). So even as 
> Stanford economist
> > Caroline Hoxby reports solid gains by charter pupils in New York 
> City,> Ohio’s school-rating system for academic year 2008-9 showed 
> that just 16% of
> > Buckeye charter pupils were in schools rated “excellent” or 
> “effective,”> while 55% of them attended schools on “academic 
> watch” or in “academic
> > emergency.” And Texas is home to some of America’s strongest 
> charters —
> > Houston is ground zero for KIPP and the “YES Prep” network — but 
> also dozens
> > of the weakest.
> > 
> > In other words, in liberal states where the teachers’ unions have 
> clout and
> > charters are greeted warily, the charter schools that do exist are
> > excellent. In conservative states where charters are greeted with 
> open arms,
> > they’re mostly mediocre. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
> > _______________________________________________
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> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> > 
> 
> -- 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
> Andy Blunden http://www.erythrospress.com/
> Classics in Activity Theory: Hegel, Leontyev, Meshcheryakov, 
> Ilyenkov $20 ea
> 
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