Diane Ravitch on a mission
Calls treatment of teachers 'mean spirited' and 'insane'
At age 72, Diane Ravitch has attained cult status among America’s teachers. They give her standing ovations when she’s introduced as a speaker, and again when she concludes her remarks. They come up to meet her and thank her, sometimes with tears in their eyes, for being such an outspoken and eloquent voice for the beleaguered profession. And they ask her to autograph her best-selling book, The Death and Life of the American School System, in which Ravitch broke with her conservative past and came out swinging against No Child Left Behind, school choice, and blaming teachers for all that’s wrong with public education.
“I’m not accustomed to this,” she told me during our interview for TOP-Ed (click here for Part 1 of the video and first half of the transcript and here for Part 2 of the video and remainder of the transcript ). “I’ve written for 40 years, and I’ve never had an experience like this.” Not that she’s complaining. Having a bestseller gives her the freedom to do what she wants, and, after a distinguished career as Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education and a scholar in what she describes as the “crème de la crème” of America’s conservative think tanks, Ravitch is content to have found herself in her new advocacy role at this time of her life.
“It’s my mission,” she acknowledged as we drove to her next speaking engagement – her fourth in 24 hours. But she chatted away energetically, still arguing against what she sees as a misguided education reform movement. “I think we’re living in an era that’s almost completely mean-spirited. I would call it insane, actually,” said Ravitch. “We never, until No Child Left Behind, thought that closing schools was a good way to improve them. It’s a stupid approach. We should be fixing the schools we have. We should not be just firing teachers wholesale, firing principals, closing schools. It doesn’t improve them.”
Her position may resonate with teachers, but lawmakers – of either party – are not exactly embracing it. While President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are considering changes to No Child Left Behind when the law is reauthorized, their major initiative thus far, Race to the Top, holds teachers and schools primarily accountable for student learning, not poverty or family circumstances or massive budget shortfalls. It’s a wonder anyone would choose this profession, yet the United States will need at least two million new teachers within the next decade.
Ravitch sees teachers fighting back, as many have begun to in Wisconsin, where the governor wants to dismantle public employee unions’ collective bargaining process. “Teachers have been like a powder keg,” says Ravitch. Then, in echoes of the movie Network’s Howard Beale, she adds that “Wisconsin was like the flash point, where people could actually gather together and say, “We’ve had enough! We won’t take it any more!”
So what is it that would improve schools and student learning? When I asked Ravitch what her version of education reform would look like, the list was a mix of practical and philosophical. At the top is rethinking teacher recruitment, retention, and support and, within that, a loan forgiveness program for college students who go into teaching. That discussion, she says, should take place at the highest level, through a presidential commission.
Ravitch is quick to note that teachers were calling for similar reforms long before her conversion. “There are many people who have said to me, ‘I’ve been saying this for 10 years. Where were you?’ And I have to say, ‘You know, I’m a slow learner!’”
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Ravitch will be on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart tomorrow evening (Thursday, March 4) — 8 p.m.
She’s pretty witty in her own right, so it should be a good interview. Here she pokes fun at the Denver Post for characterizing the public school parents who engaged her to speak as a “shadowy group”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VguNoQEa1Xk
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It is interesting that Ravitz is receiving such open armed reception among the education establishment since her self professed awakening after the years of association with neocon think tanks . But she is a relative latecomer to recognizing the effects of federal planned obfuscation of real education compared to writers and earlier voices such as Berit Kjos, author of “Brave New Schools”; Allen Quist, author of “Fed Ed, the New Federal Curriculum and How It’s Enforced”; and Charlotte Iserbyt, author of “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America”, to name a few. Her awakening is a good thing, but she needs to progress toward more “aha” moments. i.e. She identifies with what is currently in headlines from Wisconsin as teachers fighting for reform. What is going on in Wisconsin has nothing to do with education reform and everything to do with union organizing. Education reform would include teachers themselves taking a long overdue look at unions contributing to diminishing their perception as the professionals they are and need to be. She has not yet come to connect the dots re: the necessity of getting the Federal Government out of the business of education. A growing number of legislators are beginning to suggest that.
Instead, she goes off the rail by suggesting that student loans be forgiven to college students who go into teaching with the creation of a ”presidential commission” to oversee it. Real reform needs to move away from Federal meddling in education, not creating more commissions.
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I certainly agree with Ms. Ravitch that one of the unintended and very negative consequence of NCLB has been the insane narrowing of curriculum, in which vocational education, civics, history, geography, music, art, and a host of other disciplines have been squeezed-out of the instructional day (”If it aint tested, it aint taught”).
Her points about high-stakes exams and the pressures being put on teachers are well taken as well, although I must agree with Ms. Thompson (Comments) that part of the affliction of the teaching profession is the heavy-handed, status quo defense of their union leadership. I believe teacher unions are losing their moral authority in the body politic, since their leaders seem to have lost sight of what their rank-and-file attempt to faithfully serve every day: students. I think individual teachers need to be willing to stand on their own and speak-up for what they know is best for their students, even if that means crossing the union on occasion.
I also must concur with Ms. Thompson’s concern about the federalization of education policy. We have learned through sad experience in California (following the adoption of Prop 13) that local control and community involvement in our schools have steadily eroded, as Sacramento politicians began usurping more control over education policies and funding priorities. These “generalists” have not proven capable of grasping all of the unintended consequences of their broad policy decisions; the further those decisions are made from the classroom, the less realistic they become. NCLB, “Race to the Test” and the next ESEA Reauthorization will likely … and most unfortunately … continue this troubling trend of concentrating education policy decisions in the hands of smaller circles of elites, more in tune with today’s dominant culture, but not necessarily in step with young children and struggling adolescents.
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Thanks for this piece. I enjoyed Diane Ravitch’s book and consider her a good colleague and friend. And yes, when I attended the CTA conference last year, she was the hero–standing ovations!
To these ideas, I would add, that in order to improve teaching and learning in our schools, we need to actively recruit parents and students in the effort. I have always been very bothered by the fact that our laws and culture blame teachers when students don’t learn. This bothered Al Shanker also-many, many years ago. Teachers can’t do it alone. Education has to be a partnership, a team effort.
Unfortunately, our laws go the other way, laying all responsibility on teachers! For example, the No Child Left Behind Act’s ONLY role for parents is to be provided with information, to demand additional information, to request transfers or tutoring, etc. That is, parents are treated as CONSUMERS of education. That law (and others) contains NO role for parents to actually parent their children. And certainly, that law (and others) contains NO role or reward or anything to encourage students to put in effort in their own education! Without this, all the new programs and moneys and ideas won’t work.
For starters, let us work with the bully pulpit statements of President Obama–parents, turn off the TV and help your children learn.
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Miriam, the external motivators for parents and children to make full use of school systems are already very large. Here’s one link from a recent TopED blog: http://www.ed100.org/costoffailure/. Perhaps those external motivators are just too far into the future to motivate some people. I suppose the state could start withholding school services from those families that failed to make good use of them. But that seems a rather self-defeating strategy. Perhaps some system of vouchers to be used at public schools that allow people to make use of school services when they are ready might enable some improvement in outcomes. But given the natural course of a human life it seems the motivation to make use of schools when one is young is huge. Perhaps we could have teachers keep a legal log of homework assignments completed. Then students test scores could be weighted by assignments completed in any measure of school accountability. I’m going to guess this would not be an easy goal to accomplish as the definition of completeness and the teacher’s impact on that completeness would be topics of intense debate. I suppose the state could go even further and redefine child abuse to include poor use of the public school system, but given roe-v-wade is the law of the land I think most people would simply find such an approach an attack on personal liberties. You might not be thinking along any of these lines, but without any concrete suggestions I was forced to guess. Since I’ve heard this idea of making parents “more” responsible a number of times without any concrete suggestions given, I’m starting to think this is simply a rhetorical tactic to shift the focus of a discussion. I have no problem shifting the focus of the debate, but we should shift it to something more useful like increasing the amount schooling students receive.
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