If you read the news magazines or watch TV, you might get the impression that American education is deep in a crisis of historic proportions. The media tell you that other nations have higher test scores than ours and that they are shooting past us in the race for global competitiveness. The pundits say it’s because our public schools are overrun with incompetent, lazy teachers who can’t be fired and have a soft job for life.
Don’t believe it. It’s not true.
So begins one of the most important pieces on education written recently. It appears in The Saturday Evening Post, which according to their circulation statement has 350,000 paid subscribers, and with a pass-along rate of 8.3 gets almost 3 million readers per issue.
I have borrowed the title of this piece by Diane Ravitch because I believe it is an accurate statement, one well supported by what she writes.
Full disclosure before I proceed - Diane is a personal friend and professional colleague. I have also posted a comment on the discussion of the piece at the website where it appears.
I think the piece should be widely read and widely distributed. Feel free to simply go to the piece and read it and if you agree, pass on the link.
If either I have not persuaded you of its importance and cogency, or if you have any interest in what I might add to Diane's words, by all means keep reading.
A couple of quick notes before returning to the piece. Diane Ravitch may be as qualified as anyone in the US to write a piece about the status of American public schools. She was an Assistant Secretary of Education under Lamar Alexander in the administration of George H. W. Bush, served on the National Assessment Governing Board (which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly called the Nation's Report Card) under Presidents G. H. W. Bush and Clinton, and is generally considered America's most important historian of education. She is an author of numerous books, one of which, The Death and Life of the Great American School System is considered by many the most significant book on education in the past decade.
Ravitch was originally a supporter of the goals of No Child Left Behind, but came to realize that it was not achieving any of its purported goals, and has become one of the fiercest critics of our national approach to education. She is often accused by former allies of being a turncoat, but as she once told me she has no trouble changing her mind when the evidence demonstrates she is wrong. She has never been a Republican - she was a registered Democrat while in the Department of Education and is now an independent. She has always supported both public schools and teachers unions.
Ravitch's knowledge of the history of education is very much on display in this piece. For example, we often hear people lament America's standing on comparisons of international test results, as if somehow our schools were slipping. She remind us that
when the first such test was given in 1964, we were 12th out of 12. Our students have never been at the top on those tests.
She goes on to remind us of the earlier handwringing over Sputnik in 1957 and media blaming our public schools for our failure and predicting our doom. Yet, as she notes, the Soviet Union is gone and we are still here, then she writes:
Maybe those tests are not good predictors of future economic success or decline. Is it possible that we succeeded not because of test scores but because our society encourages something more important than test scores: the freedom to create, innovate, imagine, and think differently?
There are just under 2800 words in the piece. Ravitch uses them to frame the issues, provide the information that supports her argument. She takes apart the arguments of the so-called reformers, pointing out their inconsistencies. For example, on one hand they are highly critical of teachers, claiming that many are underserving our students, as demonstrated by test scores. Some will acknowledge that teacher quality is the most important in-school factor for student success (on tests), yet
some states are lowering the standards for entry into teaching, ironically under the banner of improving teacher quality. Some, such as New Jersey, are proposing to remove certification as a requirement for teaching; others, such as Florida, are removing any stipends for experience. In Texas, a person can become a teacher by taking courses online. Still other states seek to make it easier for novices to become not only teachers, but also principals and superintendents.
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Ravitch reminds us that poverty is the biggest single factor influencing student performance. She makes sue we understand that both the Bush No Child Left Behind and its bastard progeny under the current administration place the blame teachers if student tests scores do not go up, even though such scores bear little relationship to whether students go to college or how they perform if they get there. As for the host of other policies based on a similar approach of sticks of punishments and carrots of increase funds for expanding charters and tying teacher evaluation to student test scores:
Again, not one of these policies—not one—has any consistent body of evidence behind it. The fundamental belief that carrots and sticks will improve education is a leap of faith, an ideology to which its adherents cling despite evidence to the contrary.
I have argued that what we saw in the Bush administration was a faith-based approach to educational policy. It is disconcerting to find that the policies of the Obama administration can rightly be criticized on the same grounds. The current administration has mandated expansion of charters without any qualification being required when there is no evidence that charters as a whole perform better than traditional public schools. The four punishments for lack of test success required under Race to the Top either had no research basis or had been tried and not proven to make any difference.
As a teacher, as bad as the theft of the title of No Child Left Behind from the Children's Defense Fund may have been, at least that language was not in itself offensive: we would prefer to leave no child behind, even as the policies included under that program did precisely that, narrowing the education for children who needed the most from us to little more than test prep. Yet any race - except the Special Olympics - has winners and losers. The very labeling of that program is offensive to most professional educators.
There is much more of value in the Ravitch piece. There are the lines that cut to the heart of the matter, for example
Setting an impossible goal, providing inadequate resources to pursue that goal, and then firing educators and closing schools for failing to reach it is cruel and unusual punishment.
Ravitch reminds us again and again of the real history of our schools, for example,
The good old days were not that good if you were black or disabled. Public schools routinely excluded children with disabilities, and schools in many parts of the nation were racially segregated, either by law or by custom.
A good argument builds to a strong conclusion. I think Ravitch makes a powerful argument, and perhaps her final two paragraphs will convince you:
If we are serious about closing the achievement gap, we should make sure that every pregnant woman who is poor has good prenatal care and nutrition and that every child has high-quality early education before arriving in kindergarten. The achievement gap begins before the first day of school. If we mean to provide equality of educational opportunity, we must begin to level the playing field before the start of formal schooling. Otherwise, we will just be playing an eternal game of catch-up—and we cannot win that game.
It is worth remembering that the reason we first established public education was to advance the common good of the community. It began in small towns, where communities agreed that all the children should be educated for the good of all and the sake of the future. Public schools have a civic mission: They are expected to prepare young people to become citizens and to share in the responsibility of maintaining our society. As political forces tear them apart, creating opportunities for entrepreneurs and for profit, it diminishes our commonwealth. That is a price we must not pay.
That is a price we must not pay - it is a price we are seeing in so many public services, to the detriment of our nation and our society. If we lose our public schools we will have lost our democracy.
I hope you will read the entire Ravitch piece. I hope you will do what you can to ensure that others do so as well.
American Schools Are In Crisis. They are AT RISK. There is little time left. If we do not act now, it will be too late.