Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System
Barkan, Joanne
B O O K S Aboutface: A Conservative Rethinks Education Policy JOANNE BARKAN T D L G A S S 2 H T C A U E by Diane Ravitch Basic Books, 2010, 288 pp.,...
...Most middleclass kids around the country go to good public schools, some of them superb...
...Charter schools are supposed to spur regular public schools to improve through competition...
...By 2008 the foundation had spent $2 billion, mostly on dividing large high schools into small ones and starting new ones from scratch...
...JB is a writer who lives in Manhattan and on Cape Cod...
...In 2000 the foundation decided that the silver bullet to improve high schools with low graduation rates was small size...
...Of course, the “class issue” doesn’t negate the need to improve lowperforming schools...
...After three years of rethinking and a change of political alliances, Ravitch has come out with The Death and Life of the Great American School System...
...they can expel difficult students more easily (they, too, return to the public schools...
...Comparing state and NAEP results shows what is really going on...
...Nearly a third of all students in Washington, D.C., now attend them...
...But the battle over schooling is fundamentally ideological: the most powerful contenders believe that the private sector will always work more efficiently and more effectively than government...
...funded by procharter groups, including the Walton Family Foundation, and published by Stanford University in 2009...
...Meanwhile, freemarket ideologue Milton Friedman pioneered another kind of school choice in his 1955 article “The Role of Government in Education”: he argued that schools should be publicly funded but privately run with each student getting a voucher for his or her school of choice...
...Some may share the ideology, all want the money...
...Ravitch summarizes the results: the study “analyzed data from 2,403 charter schools in fifteen [sic] states (about half of all charters and 70 percent of all charter students in the nation at the time) and found that 37 percent had learning gains that were significantly below those of local public schools...
...She never offers a detailed explanation of how her reasoning changed...
...Friedman brought his voucher idea to the Reagan White House, where he was an adviser...
...In 2009 New York reported a jump in math proficiency in grades three through eight from 65.8 percent to 86.5 percent in just three years...
...90 DISSENT SPRING 2010...
...The three major foundations in education represent a new model of grantgiving— ”venture philanthropy” or “philanthrocapitalism...
...I was aware that I had undergone a wrenching transformation in my perspective on school reform...
...Ravitch reviews what seems like innumerable studies, including the most comprehensive and authoritative one so far, Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States (actually thirteen states, Chicago, Denver, and D.C...
...Ravitch concludes Death and Life with her ideas about where to begin: “…we must first of all have a vision of what good education is….What knowledge is of most worth...
...For Ravitch standardized tests are needed, but they shouldn’t be the only measure of a student’s, teacher’s, or school’s performance...
...there’s no benefit in helping the best or worst * Implemented in stages, the NCLB mandate now requires standardized testing (1) annually in reading and math in grades three through eight, (2) twice in science in the elementary grades, and (3) at least once in all three subjects in high school...
...Oh, well, it’s only money...
...Yet they don’t...
...No single policy has warped classroom life more than the NCLB testing regime.* Given the high stakes—lose your job, lose your school— ”[m]ost districts, especially urban districts where performance is lowest, relentlessly engage in test prep activities….For weeks or even months before the state test, children are drilled daily in testtaking skills and on questions mirroring those that are likely to appear on the state test...
...funding for her work at Columbia and New York universities came from conservative foundations, primarily the Olin Foundation...
...For more on this, see Richard Rothstein’s Class and Schools...
...The foundation also gives grants to almost all the major think tanks, advocacy groups, and many publications in the field, “leaving almost no one willing to criticize its vast power and unchecked influence...
...She attended the same public elementary school on the South Side of Chicago as Michelle Obama (only earlier...
...The small schools did not offer the programs, classes, and activities that had been available in the larger school, and enrollment plummeted by nearly half as students interested in college, athletics, and music transferred to other schools….In 2002, threequarters of the students at Manual were lowincome...
...Ravitch begins her chapter on school choice with an engaging history of the notion...
...When the Supreme Court decided in 2002 that religious schools could participate in statefunded voucher programs, their moment had already passed...
...She allied herself with conservative scholars...
...Under NCLB each state designs its own standards and tests...
...But for the students and staff of the failed small schools, the experience was costly in ways apparent only by looking at individual schools...
...The NAEP is given biennially as an audit on what the states are doing...
...One would think that politicians and megafunders who are working to replace the traditional public school system with their privatized version would now be reconsidering their goal...
...Ravitch’s writing style is straightforward, more than a tad repetitive for my tastes, but not polemical...
...Tennessee claimed that 90 percent of its students were proficient readers, but NAEP reported that 26.2 percent were…” and so on...
...In a New York Post article cited by Ravitch, a thirdgrade teacher in Brooklyn summed up the results of this kind of teaching: “The kids can’t tell you who the president was during the Civil War...
...The Death and Life of the Great American School System is a warning cry, but one that’s embedded in historical narrative, data that includes the studies used by the “other side” (questions of teaching and learning don’t produce simple answers), and detailed analysis of policies...
...and only 17 percent showed growth that was significantly better...
...The state produced this miraculous result by lowering the bar...
...it’s primarily schools for lowincome kids that need immense improvement...
...Summarizing observations made in 2005 by Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the uberconservative American Enterprise Institute, Ravitch writes that “education policy experts steer clear of criticizing the megarich foundations...
...With few exceptions, the new high schools had lower test scores than unaltered schools in the same districts...
...This brings me to the most alarming chapter in Ravitch’s book: “The Billionaire Boys’ Club...
...teacher and principal turnover increased...
...They raise scores by making the tests easier or lowering the passing grade...
...Or a place to live for SPRING 2010 DISSENT 89 BOOKS kids in shelters...
...On the contrary, she insists that she remains good friends with many of them, and until November 2009, she stayed in the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force—a group of scholars who advocate market principles in education—in order to debate the issues...
...In the 1970s, she took on the left academics who argued that capitalist elites had used the public schools to shape the behavior and thinking of an emerging proletariat...
...The data are so bad—why aren’t they backing away from the project...
...Ravitch mentions that most lowincome children start school less ready to learn than middleclass children...
...For example, in 2006 a seventh grader needed a score of 59.6 percent to meet state math standards...
...Ravitch describes what happened when the small schools opened: [T]he new principals began to squabble over the use of the cafeteria, the library, and the gym, even over the division of textbooks...
...With these advantages, charter schools should perform much better than regular public schools...
...they demand that their nonunion teachers work much longer hours, weekends, and in summer school, and then they bring in new recruits to compensate for the typically SPRING 2010 DISSENT 87 BOOKS high teacher turnover...
...This would be an improvement, but it doesn’t solve the problem of “teaching to the test...
...Southerners used choice as a strategy to avoid desegregation: first they allowed students to choose the public school they would attend, ensuring that whites could stay in their allwhite schools...
...Six of Boston’s sixteen charters had not a single Englishlanguage learner...
...Unlike traditional foundations, they don’t review proposals submitted to them...
...But they inevitably operate at a significant advantage and end up undermining public schools...
...In February 2006, the Denver Board of BOOKS Education voted to shut down Manual for a year, renovate it, and redesign it...
...I wish she had considered that not all public schools are failing...
...Some of the advantages are well known, others not: charter schools enroll the more motivated students—those who enter the lotteries to get in...
...no studies persuaded her that imposing a business strategy on education would work—no such studies existed...
...But they can tell you how to eliminate answers on a multiplechoice test...
...Today almost five thousand are operating in the country, most of them in lowincome urban areas where students were failing...
...In 2001 Manual High School in Denver received a Gates grant for $1 million to turn itself into three small schools, one on each floor of the existing building...
...they are exempt from some state and district regulations...
...86 DISSENT SPRING 2010 BOOKS performing kids...
...I started to see the danger of the culture of testing that was spreading through every school, community, town, city, and state….I came to realize that the sanctions embedded in NCLB were, in fact, not only ineffective but certain to contribute to the privatization of large chunks of public education...
...When I realized that the remedies were not working, I started to doubt the entire approach to school reform that NCLB represented...
...The project involved 2,600 schools in fortyfive states...
...This touted experiment to create better performing schools has had an 83 percent failure rate so far...
...This alone makes the argument that what’s wrong with “bad” schools is not that they are public...
...In the real world, these buzzwords have meant federally mandated “highstakes” testing for all students, merit pay for teachers when test scores improve, firing teachers and closing schools when “adequate yearly progress” isn’t made, and the proliferation of charter schools...
...They unveiled some new plans: $500 million to create performancebased teacher pay systems, another $500 million to create data systems, $7 million to study ways for school officials to measure teacher effectiveness and fire inadequate teachers...
...bad economic times put them under tremendous stress...
...Yet as soon as her allies’ free market ideology won out in education policy, she embraced the ideology and joined their campaign...
...Why doesn’t the Gates Foundation pay for an eye exam for every lowincome child...
...All that trouble for scores that are quite meaningless...
...In November 2008, the Gateses—who say they decide on every grant themselves with the help of just two or three staff people—hosted a conference in Seattle for a hundred or so national education leaders to discuss the “real” problem with America’s public schools—ineffective teachers...
...Those were the good old days...
...Early in 2009, Bill Gates admitted that “many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way...
...This question leads her to the subject of curriculum—”a starting point for other reforms...
...The system is literally corrupting...
...instead they decide what major changes they want to bring about in the world and devise a strategy to achieve them...
...The hubris of the foundations and the messes they’ve already made boggle the mind...
...Both Reagan and William Bennett, his secretary of education, supported the idea, and the conservative Heritage, Cato, and Olin foundations began pushing it...
...Ravitch faced this turning point after a fairly straight, fortyyear trajectory in her field...
...Some principals and teachers try to reduce the number of lowperformers taking the test: they ask those kids to stay home or suspend them just before the test or put them on the special education list because those scores aren’t counted with the others...
...I]ncentives and sanctions may be right for business organizations where the bottom line—profit—is the highest priority, but they are not right for schools...
...Ravitch reports the results of a 2009 Boston Globe investigation of the city’s schools: “English language learners were nearly onefifth of the public school enrollment, yet the city’s charters (with only one exception) contained fewer than 4 percent of such students...
...by 2005, the proportion was 91 percent….[T]he academic results of the transformation were awful...
...to date, not a single book has been published that has questioned their education strategies...
...Academics carefully avoid expressing any views that might alienate the big foundations, to avoid jeopardizing future contributions to their projects, their university, or the district 88 DISSENT SPRING 2010 they hope to work with...
...nearly all are nonunion...
...history: they had provided the main opportunity for literacy and social mobility...
...The push for these reforms began during the administration of Bush père, gained traction under Clinton, succeeded under Bush fils (as the 2001 No Child Left Behind law— NCLB), and continues apace with Obama’s Race to the Top program, which has states competing for large grants...
...She implies she was dazzled by the proximity to power and writes that previously “[t]he issue of choice had never been important to me...
...Why Gates decided this, no one knows...
...During her Washington sojourn, Ravitch adopted the Republican playbook on education quickly, wholeheartedly, and, it seems, unthinkingly...
...they get additional private funding for smaller classes, enrichment programs, summer school, and equipment from proponents of the charter movement...
...Ravitch argues that the Gates foundation is setting policy at every level of the education system—from school districts to the U.S...
...46 percent had gains that were no different from the local public schools...
...B O O K S Aboutface: A Conservative Rethinks Education Policy JOANNE BARKAN T D L G A S S 2 H T C A U E by Diane Ravitch Basic Books, 2010, 288 pp., $26.95 It’s fall 2007...
...The picture is appalling: “Texas, for example, reported in 2007 that 85.1 percent of its students in grades four and eight were proficient readers, but on NAEP tests, only 28.6 percent were...
...Death and Life serves as a guide— comprehensive, well documented, and disturbing—to the transformation of public education in America today...
...But she focuses most of her attention on the Gates Foundation, which makes sense: it has the largest endowment of any foundation in the world by far (somewhere between $35 billion and $39 billion...
...The only realitybased test right now is the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) which examines fourthand eighthgrade reading and math skills and has higher standards than almost all state tests...
...In order to implement Bill Clinton’s education program in 1994, Congress funded a drive to create additional charter schools...
...No school can completely make up for what they’ve lost—cognitively, physically, socially—by age three...
...Proponents of privatization had found a more powerful, less problematic vehicle: charter schools...
...She began writing about public education in the late 1960s with an article about interventions for failing students and an investigation into the explosive controversy over community control in the New York City school system...
...In Death and Life, Ravitch delves into each major initiative of the market strategy: she traces how the policies evolved under both Republicans and Democrats, she reviews a mountain of data on the results so far, she reports on the ideological blinders of politicians, their efforts to spin the results, and the cheerleading role of prominent but illinformed journalists...
...Public school districts are chronically underfunded...
...particularly important, they almost always have fewer special education students and Englishlanguage learners...
...This book is not a tellall account of the analytical failings and personal foibles of her former comrades in the conservative movement...
...When the courts compelled school districts to assign students to integrated schools, public officials encouraged whites to create private schools of choice, known as “segregation academies...
...Department of Education—but it is accountable to no one...
...Frightening indeed, especially if you believe, as leftists do, that democracy depends on the availability of a good public education for everyone...
...Only 20 percent of those who started ninth grade in the fall of 2001 graduated four years later, and no student at the school reached the advanced level on state tests of reading and mathematics in 2003, 2004, or 2005...
...They don’t like publicsector services, they disdain labor unions, and the negative results of research rarely penetrate their ideological blinders...
...These latter are publicly funded but privately run by any entity—profit or nonprofit—that gets a state charter...
...Take, for example, the Gates Foundation’s first major initiative in education...
...She accepted and served as assistant secretary in charge of the Office of Educational Research and Innovation for the last eighteen months of the administration...
...preference goes to states that lift the caps they’ve placed on the number of charter schools...
...Where once I had been hopeful, even enthusiastic, about the potential benefits of testing, accountability, choice, and markets, I now found myself experiencing profound skepticism about these same ideas….I was trying to see my way through the blinding assumptions of ideology and politics, including my own...
...When she does mention the subject, she uses passive constructions: “Having been immersed in a world of true believers, I was influenced by their ideas” or “In the 1990s, I found myself in step with people who quoted Peter Drucker and other management gurus” or “…I was swept along by immersion in the upper reaches of the first Bush presidency where choice and competition were taken for granted as successful ways to improve student achievement” [my italics...
...Ravitch knows precisely when and where she first realized that she was promoting policies that could destroy public education in the United States: on November 30, 2006, at an American Enterprise Institute conference in Washington, D.C., where she heard a dozen scholars analyze the results of NCLB to that point...
...it dwarfs both Broad (about $2 billion) and Walton (about $1.6 billion...
...In 1991 Lamar Alexander, Secretary of Education under George H. W. Bush, asked Ravitch—a lifelong registered Democrat—to join his department...
...Ravitch comes full circle, back to the main focus of her work in the 1980s, a time that was precharters, prederegulation, preprivatization, preobsessivehighstakes testing, predatadriven decision making...
...Diane Ravitch is packing a career’s worth of reading and writing on public schooling in America into boxes: the time had come to repaint her Brooklyn home office, to reconsider the previous fifteen years she’d spent championing marketbased reforms in education, and to sink into a fullblown intellectual crisis...
...It’s not surprising, as Ravitch puts it, that “the offer of a multimilliondollar grant by a foundation is enough to cause most superintendents and school boards to drop everything and reorder their priorities...
...Ravitch sketches the history of the Broad and Walton foundations and describes several of their ventures (which include some spectacular flops...
...They fund organizations and projects to further their strategy, or they create them...
...Every fraction of a grade point matters, so teachers tend to focus on the students who will manage to pass if they get extra attention...
...In the 1980s, she promoted higher curriculum standards while defending “the canon” against the postmodernists...
...During the Clinton years and for most of SPRING 2010 DISSENT 85 BOOKS George W. Bush’s two terms, Ravitch championed the market reform package: accountability, datadriven decision making, choice, deregulation, competition, and privatization...
...they can encourage low performers to return to the public schools...
...Perhaps most important (because practically no one else has dared), Ravitch analyzes the imperious role played by the supersized private funders of school reform—the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and especially the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation...
...NAEP is a “no stakes” test: states see the results, but they have no consequences...
...Obama is supporting an effort to develop national K12 standards...
...But vouchers had two political problems: voters in several states rejected them, and the controversy over using them for religious schools had to make its way through the courts...
...graduation rates did not improve...
...states that prohibit using test scores to evaluate teachers are not eligible...
...For Ravitch public schools had played exactly the opposite role in U.S...
...But what about the school superintendents and boards who go along with the private funders...
...The alliance of politicians, their appointees, and the three largest private donors in education—the Broad, Walton, and Gates foundations—has become a juggernaut...
...Those are legal tactics—there’s also “plain old fashioned cheating...
...in 2009 the passing mark was 44 percent...
...In fact, the help that they and their parents need begins at birth or even before...
...most of the research available, according to Ravitch, was written by advocates of small schools...
...the foundation had already started pouring funds into charter schools...
...Ravitch describes the conference briefly without mentioning that she was there, but she’s quoted in a report about the meeting posted on gothamschools.org: “In a way, being Secretary of Education is less significant than being Bill Gates….From the point of view of, let’s say, the democratic process, it’s frightening...
Vol. 57 • March 2010 • No. 2
