A DEBATE ON EDUCATION

...On page 158, Ravitch claims that Head Start's "original plan was intellectually oriented and aimed specifically to develop 'the attitudes and aptitudes' associated with 'middle-class culture.'" The reference to "the ideal set forward in 1964" by Bloom, Davis, and Gess comes six pages earlier in a discussion of the theory of cultural deprivation, not of Head Start...

...The "traditional" curriculum, Ravitch continues, "emphasized free play and permissive adultchild relations rather than structured learning...

...Probably the most egregious misuses of inconsistent experimental data was the misrepresentation of the mental discipline issue," which led the progressives to eliminate Latin and advanced mathematics as obligatory courses in secondary schools...

...As they enter the system, three- and four-year-olds are tested and then sorted into gifted and handicapped slots...

...When I record a debate that occurred 30 years ago between progressives and critics like Arthur Bestor and Robert Hutchins, I set forward as honestly as I know how what the views of the antagonists were...

...The bar is being raised in our schools, while provisions for the needs of individual learners are being systematically restricted...

...But it is tragic to see their interests, passions, and curiosity about the world squeezed out of the classrooms and replaced by more and more mandated programs tied into testing and accountability schemes...

...xii...

...One's first obligation as a historian is to represent the past accurately, not to present a party line...

...Despite the child-centered experts, most real-life Head Start classrooms focused narrowly on 3–R skills...

...Unfortunately, Meier is unable to distinguish between polemic and history and thus projects her own strong ideological bias on whatever she reads...

...Coming at a time when unions are under severe assault, Ravitch could have dissociated herself from them, something members of commission reports do on occasion...

...most needed to learn" these skills and values...

...Well, let's see...

...She can't seem to understand that a history such as this reproduces contemporary arguments, debates, and pronouncements as they were expressed, and that they are not put there by the author for ideological reasons...

...Yes, Diane Ravitch, it's this real stuff that happens to us in our schools that makes me sensitive to the way you tell our history...

...For example, she does this in several instances with the phrase "tough, verbal, and required," which also appears as "verbal, tough, and required" (pp...

...Some states have gone further...

...Page 157...

...These are casualties of an ideological assault by powerful groups who also demand that schools stick to "limited goals...

...The three authors I cited are superb describers of such classrooms, and Ravitch's brief summary of each book was, as I said, either distorted or inaccurate, even if flattering...

...A lot of action is going on out there in the real world...

...My socialist views are not unrelated to my educational views, although they do not predetermine them...

...The events of the Hundred Years War are filtered differently by Froissart and by Barbara Tuchman...

...SIMILAR ERRORS and purposeful misreadings can be found in nearly every paragraph in the article...

...Is this not precisely an example of the kind of failure to limit goals that she 226 writes about in her introduction (p...

...Under the mantle of disinterested historian, Ravitch presents a version of the recent past that lends support to a whole set of existing proposals that will drag us not so slowly off in what, I strongly believe, is the wrong direction...

...1) To describe Ravitch as a "neoconservative" is not to charge her with a crime...

...She points to several explanations for the failure to realize the "original plan" cited above —from "explosive growth" to "the experts in early childhood education...

...225 Page 326...

...Not even Summerhill practiced letting kids do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted...

...67, 69...

...I believe that the press, the mass media, religious institutions, and labor unions are also potent instruments of education, and that their freedom to flourish is necessary in a democracy...

...Neoconservative" seems to fit not only this book but most of Ravitch's published work on education during the past decade...

...That makes about as much sense as a "Democratic historian" or a "Republican historian...

...Similarly, compare her reference to the books by James Herndon to my description of them as "the memoirs of the articulate young teacher who triumphs over his principal, the other teachers, and the system by treating his pupils as human beings...

...There is another way of telling that same story, another view of what were the primary roadblocks facing the poor, both in our schools and in the labor market...

...THIS PROJECTION OF HER BIAS leads her to impute views to me that are not present in the book...

...Increasingly legislators and school boards, not teachers, select curricula, determine our daily schedules, the amount of homework assigned, promotional rules, and grading policies...

...Any teacher can tell you, and studies amply confirm, that the standard curriculum of most schools for at least the past 30 years has consisted of pretty much the same watered-down, largely required list of courses that meet neither this liberal ideal nor exaggerated permissiveness...

...If the views of Bloom et al...

...This led me to think Ravitch would favor more homework, a tougher grading system, and more required and verbal courses...

...The hero in her concluding true-life story is Rowan Torrey, a lay citizen in the deep South, "college educated and toughened in the Marines...

...The New York Regents are currently voting on a plan that would eliminate all electives, including most art and vocational courses, from high schools that give a Regents diploma...

...Does she really believe that this is what she's doing when (on p. 78) she describes the progressives as "a cult whose principles were taught as dogma and whose critics were treated as dangerous heretics...

...Examples: Page 49...

...It was certainly [italics added] true that the poor needed the verbal skills and work habits that the productive sector of the economy required...

...Critics of "middle-class values" had a "crude analysis" and used "confused categories," Ravitch says...

...1. Diane Ravitch I am grateful to the editors of Dissent for the opportunity to reply to Deborah Meier's article, " 'Getting Tough' in the Schools: A Conservative Prescription," reviewing my book, The Troubled Crusade, in the Winter 1984 Dissent...

...They may go toward longer hours but not to decreasing class sizes...

...Pages 328-30...

...Piecemeal is what I earn my bread at, and our educational system certainly needs reform...

...Mass testing has played at least as large a role in changing the shape of education as the demise of Latin...

...This is not an ideological problem for me, Diane Ravitch...

...And what's the source for thinking she's opposed to them, and that she advocates more homework and tougher grading...

...It's fair to question the "supposedly 'scientific' findings" as well as the experimental methods of the progressives, and to regret the dropping of Latin...

...She insists on putting words in my mouth, or in my book, which fit her argument...

...Let me make clear that I reject the designation "neoconservative historian...

...And 5 percent of our children are annually declared "handicapped" and sent off to underfunded special education schools while "standards" go up, early pressures to perform increase, and objective "norms" disregard individual variations and different cultures...

...Does she really not recognize that in typical neoconservative fashion she has posed "cognitive" and "intellectual" in counterposition to free play, psychological services, nutrition, and so on...

...Is it solely the claim of historic truth that leads Ravitch to end her book with this particular vignette or is it her admiration for Torrey's approach to solving our educational ills...

...During the same period IQ and achievement tests were institutionalized, despite the questionable "scientific" foundations upon which they rested...

...159), she continues with this critical point: "the expectation that Head Start would stress intellectual growth and transition to 'middle-class' values was not realized...

...She misquotes my straightforward description of several books in order to make me fit the narrowminded characterization she has invented...

...Learning the ABCs, not blocks and sand, were "in...

...q 224 2. Deborah Meier Replies Diane Ravitch disclaims the designation of "neoconservative historian" and presents the job description "historian" uncontaminated by a point of view...

...In an article by Eleanor Duckworth in the Winter 1984 Harvard Education Review (which I commend to Dissent readers), Massachusetts' educator John Lawton is quoted as remarking that "if a kid can't clear four feet, it doesn't do much good to raise the bar to four feet, six inches...

...Diane Ravitch's "certainly" is built upon what I believe is a gross oversimplification and misinterpretation of the issues...

...Ask Pat Moynihan...

...Ravitch's book is not written in a vacuum...

...The pervasive quality of Ravitch's book, like so much of the literature on schooling, is an absence of understanding of real classroom life and the compromises and dilemmas that cause our best-laid plans to founder...

...Some events are included, others omitted...

...In the next paragraph on Head Start (p...

...She would have the reader believe that I am opposed to health, nutrition, and improved family life for poor children...

...second, the book has been favorably received by reviewers in publications of the American Federation of Teachers...

...Her references to the book are without exception either misstatements of fact, misinterpretations, misquotations, unfounded allegations, misattributions of my views, or misuses of context...

...Ravitch has her history wrong...

...I hesitate to call Deborah Meier's article a book review, because it has so little to do with the book I wrote...

...The word "admirable" is not in her original...

...161) merely quotes him, neither approvingly nor disapprovingly...

...But today onsite medical teams are an idle dream and parental involvement is passe...

...Is this what she calls "enthusiastic...

...3) The major substantive attack Ravitch makes is that I am both "malicious and dishonest" in presenting her view of Head Start and its goals...

...But this is Ravitch speaking, not history...

...Early marriage and large families, and women's sole responsibility for their care, were not phenomena existing in a vacuum...

...We're again seeing overaged and oversized boys stuck in lower grades until they're finally old enough to be truant...

...In reality, the book contrasts the subsequent development of Head Start with the ideal set forward in 1964 by Benjamin Bloom, Allison Davis, and Robert Hess, who said that the school and the community should provide each child with breakfast, lunch, appropriate clothing, and medical care, if his parents were not able to...

...Contrary to her assertions, The Troubled Crusade contains no policy recommendations, no visions of the future (corporate or otherwise), no pedagogical prescriptions: It is a history...

...We want results...

...Now TO SOME of the specific charges of misquotation, malice, and so on...

...The current state of research on most educational issues precludes proof, but Ravitch, like most of us, tends to cite those research claims that suit her biases...

...It is true that her book has an appearance of Olympian disinterestedness...

...In her footnote 12, she suggests that I am antiunion, because I was a member of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Federal Role in Education, whose report included some phrases critical of unions, and that I am soft on tuition tax credits because they are "a curious omission" in my history...

...5) Yes, "tough, verbal, and required" are not Ravitch's exact words...

...they are the statements of influential spokesmen...

...The reader should not assume that a word or a phrase surrounded by quotation marks is drawn from the book...

...The tuition-tax credit issue has been in the spotlight long before Ravitch sent her book to the publisher...

...On page 61, she claims that I use the label "permissive progressivism," but I can't find that phrase anywhere in the book...

...The one thing raising the bar will do is eliminate more kids 227 from the competition...

...At a time of public stinginess, "adopt-a-school" is the newest corporate charity, a bizarre notion at best...

...Diane Ravitch has hold of some valuable material here, but not the whole story...

...Limited funds may go to improving salaries but not to giving teachers more decision-making power...

...Considerable data suggest that course options are vital to many of our children, and it seems inequitable that privateschool parents will still be able, by paying huge sums, to make sure their kids get them...

...These are still admirable goals for Head Start...

...Because the article is so riddled with error, it is impossible for me to respond to all of them without writing a piece longer than hers...

...Do you hear a deck being stacked...

...In typical Head Start centers, cognitive goals were no more important, and often less important, than social, medical, and psychological services, nutrition, adult career development, and parent involvement...

...The cause of early marriage and large families is surely more complex than sexist readers...

...Probably the most egregious" is a judgment, not fact...

...IN REALITY, RAVITCH'S NOTION Of "cognitive growth" was the prevalent one from the start, and it has remained the guiding principle of most Head Start classrooms...

...Last, as long as she was reading the Twentieth Century Fund report and associating me with its recommendations, why didn't she mention that the report specifically rejects tuition tax credits and vouchers and calls for a substantial increase in federal spending for education...

...Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Barbara Biber, and Milly Almy, all selfproclaimed progressives, are not once mentioned although this was the period they did some of their most important work...

...are, as Ravitch now claims, "admirable," why implicitly denigrate them here...

...I'm sorry I didn't make that clear...

...6) As to unionism and tuition tax credits—I wasn't claiming that Ravitch was antiunion, maybe just not very courageous...

...consequently the typical Head Start project was 'child-centered' and focused on 'the development of the whole child' with emphasis on social and emotional growth...

...In explaining why more men than women finished college and received advanced degrees, Ravitch says that, "Clearly [italics added], the intervening variables were demographic factors like women's age at marriage and the fertility rate, not the language of readers...

...245), to make a point entirely unrelated to his work...

...When our traditional early-childhood values are under assault, your ever-so-careful explanation that you didn't actually say you opposed them is welcome...

...Our alternatives, says Ravitch, were "whether a democratic education system best served its students by letting them choose what they wanted to study, if they wanted to study, or whether it served them best by seeing that each and every one of them received a liberal education —including literature and language, science and mathematics, history and the arts...

...In a manner Ravitch does not explain, this determined black man took up the cudgels of school reform and hired a "strict disciplinarian" who soon "eliminated options...

...We are witnessing an even earlier introduction of formal paper-and-pencil instruction and formal testing in the name of "focusing on cognition...

...Some people are paraphrased, not always too kindly, and others speak eloquently for themselves...

...Surely, Ravitch would agree that reconstructing the past is an immensely complex task, requiring human judgment, selection, omission, and presentation...

...For example, she says I quoted President Johnson "approvingly," but the text itself (p...

...We don't, for one thing, yet know how to deliver Ravitch's version of the liberal arts "to each and every one" so that it will be "received...

...As a result, the "typical Head Start center put little emphasis on cognitive growth...

...She had something that she wanted to say, and my book offered her a convenient vehicle for her polemic...

...And, yes, I do believe that literacy and free political institutions of this kind are the foundations of democracy...

...The text itself, incidentally, "merely quotes" Bloom et al...

...This is a live issue...

...On the same page, she refers to "what Ravitch enthusiastically calls 'a pedagogical revolution.' " The narrative factually describes the flurry of curricular reform in the early 1960s and the interest in new technology, but concludes: "The expected pedagogical revolution in the schools was not to be, however...

...The comments in the 20th Century Fund report are not merely "critical," they're antiunion...

...To do so would have made hash of her ideological attack, but it would at least have been truthful...

...Nonsense...

...Is Ravitch providing a dispassionate historical summary of the available alternatives, or do I detect an ideologue twisting and turning views she doesn't like...

...In the absence of alternative responses to "declining standards," Ravitch's paragraph does read as support for these prescriptive solutions...

...Just one small example, acknowledged by Ravitch in her only sentence on testing (p...

...third, tuition tax credits were not an important issue during the period covered by my book, from 1945 to 1980...

...Her comments on the book's depiction of Head Start are malicious and dishonest...

...Still, if a diffusion of goals led, as Ravitch claims, to Head Start's failure to close the achievement gap, am I correct in thinking she was unhappy with that diffusion...

...Piaget is mentioned, once (p...

...I don't know why the phrases are in quotes, because they do not appear in the book...

...By the "most unfortunate irony," she continues, "scholarly and popular criticism of verbal skills and middle-class work habits occurred at the very time that large numbers of poor children...

...As one top New York City educational leader told her kindergarten supervisors recently, "The time of milk and cookies is over...

...She has no license whatever to take the words of one or another debater of another era and say that they are mine, simply because they are quoted in my book...

...If I distorted Herndon, as Meier claims, he failed to notice it in his positive review of the book in the San Francisco Chronicle last fall...

...And "demographic factors" are not causes but symptoms...

...In the same way, her quoted references to "toughness" and "rigor" are her inventions, and she has no source in the book for her claim that I advocate "more homework, tougher grading, fewer electives, and more tests...

...326), is the possibility that such testing played a major role in the decline in writing ability...

...Like Ravitch, if I don't reply to each one, it's not because I think she's right...

...Thus the reader should not assume that I accept as correct whatever I do not question...

...I hope that readers will make their own judgments by reading the book...

...The experts were "more attuned to a multifaceted, child-development approach than to the single-minded goal of intellectual growth...

...IT's NOT a comfortable situation for those trying to meet our children's needs...

...Compare her reference to the Herbert Kohl book on page 65, which makes me sound snide and disapproving, to the actual sentence in my book on page 236: "Kohl described a year of teaching in which he set aside the sterile prescribed curriculum and encouraged the children to express themselves through creative writing...

...It is my view that Ravitch's way of shaping the past 30 years is based upon a set of historical assumptions and conventional wisdoms that coincide with the major educational reports and lead to similar "inevitabilities...

...Would Ravitch feel better if she were called a historian of neoconservative outlook...

...If her implied assumptions are correct, there are real villains in this narrative, however well-intentioned...

...Even way back in the '60s when I taught Head Start, it was the "structured" workbooks, not "play," that were being promoted...

...How can Ravitch write of American schools in the postwar period without a serious recognition of Piaget's enormous importance...

...Feminists would surely agree to that...

...This same debate over early childhood goals and methods is relevant again as public schools vie for preschool and kindergarten funds...

...Is it then malicious to point this out...

...First, the treatment of the growth of unions in the book (pp...

...Thus The Troubled Crusade contains no partisan view of the world...

...She uses the review as an opportunity to express her opposition to current efforts to reform education, and she would have been on firmer ground had she directly reviewed the reports of the National Commission on Excellence, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and others (all of which appeared after my book was in press or published...

...What will happen to those who can't or don't make the new regulated standards...

...But try page 326 and you get a phrase that is hers—"easy or nonverbal electives...

...It could well be that the greatest cognitive achievements of Head Start were brought about by what happened outside the classrooms: those school lunches, medical services and, above all, the parental involvement and support that most Head Start centers thrived on...

...Yet one can hardly find a page without examples of a strong viewpoint: approval/disapproval, agreement/disagreement...

...Is this an objective historian speaking, or a neoconservative ideologue...

...Historians' fingerprints are all over the histories they write...

...Clearly, my eye...

...4) The progressives and their critics had a debate, and Ravitch insists she was just putting forth their views as "honestly as I know how...

...Precisely by omitting these major thinkers, Ravitch makes simple a complex debate...

...My disagreement is not with Ravitch's belief in piecemeal reform...

...I still do...

...that nursery schools and kindergartens should provide poor children with "the conditions for their intellectual development and the learning-to-learn stimulation which is found in the most favorable home environment...

...They are not my views...

...I never claim that formal education is the basis of democracy...

...There is nothing in the tone of the sentence or the paragraph that implies disapproval, unlike her caricature of it...

...Which was the more "egregious...

...2) Ravitch misses my point re her handling of the books by Kohl, Herndon, and Holt...

...She has a distressing habit of putting phrases in quotes in order to create the impression that she is quoting from the book...

...The people who brought us the idea that deregulation was the answer to the woes of private enterprise think top-down regulation is the answer to the woes of public education...

...Doesn't this ironic paraphrasing of the feminist critique of textbooks reveal the author's attitude...

...On page 326 she describes the central symptoms of our "declining standards" as "curtailed homework, grade inflation, and large numbers of easy or nonverbal electives...

...She is free to do so, but I did not...

...She chides me for believing that "democracy 223 rests upon formal education, that ignorance breeds tyranny, and that without literacy representative government will falter...

...The proponents of the "tradition" believed that these were fundamentally connected to intellectual growth...

...It's a daily heartache...

...But it needs saying a great deal more clearly if you're not to be adopted by politicians eager to sell the public a phony success story with improved paper-and-pencil test scores minus the cost of supplying those unnecessary social services...

...She refuses to believe that a narrative account of events and issues is acceptable unless one places a sociological or economic interpretation on it...

...Some authors get the last word, others do not...

...Assertions to the contrary," says Ravitch, "it was impossible to demonstrate that girls were, in fact, 'damaged' by textbooks that quoted men more often than women or by readers that showed mothers as housewives...

...and that the object is "to start with the child where he is and to proceed by a carefully developed and sequential program to bring him up to a level where he can learn as well as other children and eventually under the same conditions as other children...

...313-15) concludes on a positive note...

...Necessary to Ravitch's "unfortunate irony" scenario is acceptance of her interpretation of the causes of unemployment and job discrimination, her unexamined notions about the nature of the verbal skills and middle-class values these children lacked, and her limited understanding of what the more sophisticated critics meant by the damaging "culture" of schools...

...She quotes some people, not others...

...But it's a question of which pieces, which reforms...

...They are not...

...no particular "sociological or economic interpretation," "no vision of the future," "no pedagogical prescription," and "no policy recommendations...

...Not even the most brilliantly conceived and executed curriculum is the answer to decent jobs for most of my East Harlem students, though anything to improve their odds is worth it...

...Page 300...