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*
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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