What if Chicken Little had 70 billion dollars? Would his comical
error in believing the sky is falling have been dismissed so quickly? Would the
acorn of truth have been discovered and Chicken Little disgraced? Instead of
making Chicken Little the laughingstock of the barnyard, would we instead be
drawing up plans for “sky proof” shelters and evaluating them with standardized
quality control measures all financed by Chicken Little’s largesse? Perhaps
Chicken Little would decide that the public barn on the farm was substandard
and he would contract out to have charter barns built. Perhaps he would finance
a project to bring Common Corn to the barnyard feed, so that chickens in
Mississippi would be fed the same stuff as those in Wisconsin. Perhaps Chicken
Little would be lionized in the media as the great fowl hope for the future of
barnyards everywhere.
In Reign of Error: The
Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools,
Diane Ravitch, highly respected author, professor and former Assistant
Secretary of Education, has discovered the acorn in the so called education
reformers’ barnyard. What is the truth?
1. Our
schools are not failing.
2. Test
scores are higher than ever.
3. Genuine
progress has been made in narrowing achievement gaps.
4. High
school dropout rates are at an all-time low.
5. Poverty
is not an excuse for ineffective teaching; poverty is highly correlated to low achievement.
6. Test
scores are not the best way to determine teacher effectiveness.
7. Merit
pay has never improved achievement.
8. There
is no evidence that schools will improve if tenure and seniority are abolished.
9. Teach
for America which began as a noble experiment has lost its way and is now a
tool for the corporate reformers.
10. Charter
schools run the gamut from excellent to mediocre to awful and are no more
innovative or successful than public schools.
11. Virtual schools
are a poor substitute for real teachers and real schools.
12. Vouchers
are a major step toward privatization and most Americans do not favor them.
13. Firing
teachers and principals and closing schools will not improve learning.
Ravitch backs up each of these assertions with the kind of
strong narrative story telling one would expect from America’s premiere
education historian. But she also provides a wealth of charts and graphs that
demonstrate each of the points she makes. It is in this hard data that the
acorn of truth is to be found. The data make a compelling argument that the
American public has been sold a bill of goods by the reformers.
And why has this bill of goods been so easy to sell? First
of all, there is the incredible amount of money that has been invested by Bill
Gates, Eli Broad, the Walmart Family and others. Second of all, powerful
politicians like George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Secretary of Education Arne
Duncan, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal are vocal, in power, and on board with
the reform rhetoric. There is no loyal opposition here, the Democrats have
basically adopted the Republican plan and doubled down on it. Finally, the
reformers have a seductive message: the schools are failing and we know how to
fix them.
Ravitch sees the reform movement as a privatization movement.
Charter schools like to say they are public schools, but many are run by for
profit companies. When challenged to provide the kinds of data required of any
public school, they refuse on the basis that they are not public. Many have
harsh discipline policies that would never fly in public schools. Apparently
they are only public when feeding at the public trough. Vouchers have lead in
Louisiana to the growth of many fly by night schools looking to turn an easy
profit by attracting desperate parents with promises they can’t keep. Charters,
vouchers and the entire reform movement is seen by Ravitch as an existential
threat to one of the most bedrock of all American institutions – public education.
Ravitch does not believe that our schools are failing, but she
does not believe that all is well either. She sees the reformers denial of
poverty as a major factor in low achievement as absurd. Without dealing with
poverty and improving the conditions by which poor children arrive at school, we
will never be able to achieve our social contract with American children. Her
specific recommendations are as follows:
1. Provide
good pre-natal care for every pregnant woman.
2. Make
high quality early childhood education available to all children.
3. Ensure
a full balanced and rich curriculum, which includes the arts, science, history, literature, civics, geography, world languages, mathematics and physical
education for all children.
4. Reduce
class sizes, particularly in schools with large numbers of struggling children.
5. Ban
for-profit charters and charter chains and ensure charter schools work
collaboratively with public schools.
6. Provide
the medical and social services that poor children need.
7. Eliminate
high stakes standardized testing and rely instead on assessments that allow
students to show what they know and are able to do.
8. Insist
that teachers, principals, and superintendents are professional educators. Work
to attract capable students to the profession and provide them with a rigorous
training program.
9. Protect
democratic control of the public schools through elected local school boards.
10. Devise
strategies to reduce racial segregation and poverty.
Will implementing these strategies be easy? Of course not.
Will implementing these strategies cost money? Certainly. If we don’t find the
will to do these things that might actually make a difference in students’ lives;
however, then we are abandoning them to the drudgery of a test driven business
model of education that will raid the public coffers for money and leave every
child behind.
Buy the book. Read it. Get angry. And then get busy
spreading the word that Chicken Little has gotten it wrong again.
Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, by Diane Ravitch. New York: Alfred A.Knopf.
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