Learning Disabilities

...With dominance see-sawing back and forth between the progressives and traditionalists, Ravitch finds, the life expectancy of the latest "ultimate answer" has been about lOyears...

...But little additional ground is broken...

...In advocating greater teacher professionalism the author is, in effect, calling for a comparable reconstruction of American schools—an abandonment of our existing factory model that has every worker supervised to death by the "foreman" immediately above him on the corporate ladder...

...The same can be said when it comes to education in this country...

...And the logic of Ravitch's work suggests that she should next turn her formidable talents to answering the questions it raises...

...Less than two decades later the proponents of a utilitarian curriculum overthrew them...

...Indeed, the ray of hope she sees is that we may finally have learned something from history—the pendulum, she says, may haveswung oncetoo many times—although she does not specify the reasons for her optimism...

...Under the pressure of foreign competition, American industry is at present in the midst of a soul-searching reassessment of its longstanding managerial practices...

...In Ann Arbor, Michigan, for instance, a Federal judge ordered the school board to train teachers in "black English," which subsequentiy proved of no value in educating black students...

...When she visited what she describes as a superior school in New York City, Edward R. Murrow High School, she was impressed by the dialogue between faculty and students...

...Reviewed by Albert Shanker President, American Federation of Teachers David Ben Gurjon once observed that his main difficulty in running Israel was having to contend with a nation of prime ministers...

...Readers of Diane Ravitch's previous book, The Troubled Crusade, will find much of this familiar...

...The teachers she observed were making intelligent use of amethod refined long ago by Socrates...

...Until now generations of teachers have struggled to keep the faith against the onslaught of politicization, fads and downright silliness in the isolation of their classrooms...

...Today bright, well-educated people simply will not seek employment in our discredited system where all wisdom descends from on high...

...collectively, we make and remake them...

...I'm reminded of a piece on the New York Times Op-Ed page several years back by a New York high school English department faculty member...

...How would teachers successfully sustain their position against the agendas of the gurus of education...

...In fact, we will have to go beyond this...

...Supposedly impractical subjects like foreign languages and history gave way to life adjustment courses and social studies...

...What we lack, she maintains, is " a philosophical commitment to education that is sound and strong enough to withstand the dictates of fashion...

...Yet the baneful effects of the constant shifts in curriculum and methodology would be much worse, declares Ravitch, except for the good sense of the legion of teachers whose "commitment, both to knowledge and to their students, has moderated and finally blunted pedagogical fashions that were not solidly grounded in good educational practice...

...By Ravitch's own account our schools are not products of forces beyond our control...

...Instead, they have "treated them as classroom furniture rather than as thinking, possibly disputatious human beings...

...What, for example, would be the function of the present supervisory staff...

...We are just told that with the application of good will, clear thinking and knowledge we will "deserve" better schools...

...Ravitch therefore asks us to take better advantage of the intelligence that has always been there—to increase the professional role of teachers in curriculum development, textbook selection, peer evaluation, and related areas...

...In her latest book, a collection of essays written over the last decade, she shows that since the end of the last century our schools have been vulnerable to all sorts of radical swings of the intellectual pendulum, exposed to a succession of fads, and imposed upon by political ideologues...

...To the American public there's no big mystery about pedagogy...

...What remained after the allegedly bold innovation had come and gone was a "simple equation": the teacher, the student and the book...

...She never details the new systems and relationships that might emerge to embody the teacher's new role...

...That is the rock on which all successful schools must be founded...

...The essays collected here possess these virtues in abundance...

...As in the past, she gives us a solid, scholarly perspective on the siren songs of change...

...It does mean, though, that we have to recruit and retain superior teaching talent by upgrading the basic incentives, salary and working conditions...

...He told how he survived an incursion of ill-conceived technology into his classroom...

...Administrators inevitably find themselves having to deal with wall-to-wall, self-anointed school superintendents...

...The bilingual movement, she argues, is similarly almost entirely political...

...In the 1930s the advocates of a liberal education for every student, regardless of social class or career interest, were ascendant...

...They were never used and eventually gathered dust in some supply closet, because the writer and his colleagues persisted in pursuing their tasks guided by their own best judgment...

...no hard evidence exists substantiating its effectiveness...

...Meanwhile, the gurus of change have all been so smitten by their wisdom that they have rarely consulted the men and women in front of the blackboards...

...The conflicting and frequently contradictory signals thus being flashed have resulted in kids getting the message that their teachers count for very little in the grand scheme of things...

...Ravitch puts forward the case that nothing can take the place of good instruction...

...The bulky, expensive, hopelessly impractical tape recorders and overhead projectors that supposedly heralded an audio-visual revolution were merely "baubles for some administrators to puff about and play with...

...To what extent, if at all, could the demands of politics be thwarted...

...It is not educational Luddism, one should perhaps stress, to maintain that the salvation of our schools lies in rejecting another cycle of debilitating trendy reforms and establishing conditions that promote the best teaching possible...

...More recentiy, Ravitch demonstrates, various narrow, dubious agendas have been introduced at the urging of "dogmatic crusaders whose purposes are primarily political and only incidentally related to children's education...

...Furthermore, too often the most fervid reformers have clear-cut prescriptions for other people's children, not their own...

...And this, says historian Diane Ravitch, is part of the problem in our classrooms...