Product Description
A passionate plea to preserve and renew public education, The Death and Life of the Great American School System is a radical change of heart from one of America’s best-known education experts.
Diane Ravitch—former assistant secretary of education and a leader in the drive to create a national curriculum—examines her career in education reform and repudiates positions that she once staunchly advocated. Drawing on over forty years of research and expe… More >>
Tags: American, american school system, assistant secretary, change of heart, Choice, Death, death and life, diane ravitch, education, education experts, education reform, expe, forty years, Great, Life, national curriculum, passionate plea, public education, radical change, repudiates, school, secretary of education, System, Testing, Undermining
#1 by Mark Rutherford on April 6, 2010 - 10:10 am
Diane Ravitch wants to wave a wand and send American education back to what it was in the 1950s – pretty good. She refuses to see that the quality of teachers has declined; that Albert Shanker, sadly, is long dead, and has been replaced by union leaders without the slightest concern for anything but making teachers impossible to manage and to fire; and that, left to their own devices, education authorities go for whatever idiotic ideas are currently fashionable, such as contructivist math. In this situation, accountability and testing, for all their weaknesses, are the only way to ensure decent outcomes for kids; and empowering parents with vouchers, ideally, and abundant charters as a second-best, is better than nothing.
That Diane cannot see this – and that such brilliant minds as Rita Kramer, an Amazon reviewer of this sad wreck of a book, would be swayed by Ravitch’s blindness – is a wonder, given the wisdom she has demonstrated over the years.
Any parent would understand that the educational institutions Ravitch desiderates for their children has not been available to schoolchildren for decades; while the best realistic alternatives available to them – charters and vouchers – she scorns for no reason, except that union-funded evaluations evaluate them badly. To us parents she offers nostalgia and dusty memories of past glories – and it tastes of ashes.
Rating: 1 / 5
#2 by M. Grant on April 6, 2010 - 12:54 pm
I noticed on Amazon’s site that this book is not available till March 2. I say I am suspicious because if these folks got an advance copy, they may be compatriots in this school of thought for public education.
I happened upon the book last night in a book store at the mall and read most of the first chapter. It was good to see how Ms. Ravitch admits to her changing of positions over time toward aspects of public education. I get the impression from what I read in the first chapter and what I read on the jackets of the book she wants to return to the “old” days of public education. I say that in the time frame of before public education got so political. While I do not like how it has gotten political, the reason it got there was the realization that kids were graduating high school and could not function in the business world.
I look forward to getting the book soon and walking through Ms. Ravitch’s experience and compare hers to my 25 years in a single system that has changed from a large city county system to a mostly urban system.
Rating: 3 / 5
#3 by J. Reilly on April 6, 2010 - 3:18 pm
Diane Ravitch should have stopped at “The Death of”, because all she does is describe schooling from a couple of decades ago, how great it was, and how we just need to get back to that. At that point, the book completely departs from reality and into some kind of vague, polyanna-ish solution, if there is in fact any solution at all in the book.
It’s dangerous when great thinkers like Ravitch give up on improving the system, and make no mistake; that is exactly what she has done and well documented here. We are at the beginning of a long road on education reform, and we are on the right track with accountability and some measure of competition. Ravitch’s assertion that these policies have failed is without merit and without supporting data.
Rating: 1 / 5
#4 by Neal McCluskey on April 6, 2010 - 6:17 pm
Idealists are dangerous, not because they’re idealistic but because too often they want to impose their ideals on the rest of us. That danger is clear and present in historian Diane Ravitch’s latest book, which is troubling because Ravitch herself has furnished voluminous evidence that her ideals are unlikely to survive the test of reality.
Ravitch is the nation’s best-known education historian. In chronicling schooling upheavals in New York City, exploring progressive domination of public education, and explaining how interest-group politics kill meaningful curricular content, Ravitch has been a tireless cataloguer of public schools’ dysfunction.
Unfortunately, Ravitch’s own work now seems lost on her. In “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” she explains how she has gone from being a staunch supporter of public schools to an advocate of standards, testing, and choice, and back to championing public schools.
What does Ravitch want now? “Neighborhood” public schools for all, primarily because that comports with her conviction that public schools should be tools for, essentially, forcing people together.
“As we lose neighborhood public schools,” Ravitch rhapsodizes, “we lose the one local institution where people congregate and mobilize to solve local problems, where individuals learn to speak up and debate and engage in democratic give-and-take with their neighbors.”
That sounds lovely. But Ravitch offers no evidence to support that claim, in no small part because it doesn’t comport with the reality she has spent years chronicling in her own works: Bureaucratic dominance over schools; divisive clashes between religious, ethnic, and other factions; and distressingly poor academic outcomes.
As bad as her utopianism is, Ravitch’s too-often imprecise and unfair treatment of school choice might be worse.
Ravitch categorizes as “market-based” any reform that does something other than maintain a traditional public-school monopoly. For instance, she claims, “in the first decade of the new century, New York City became the national testing ground for market-based reforms.”
Placing control of 1.1 million children in the hands of one man–Mayor Michael Bloomberg–is market-based? True, Bloomberg has pushed for charter and public-school choice. But he rejects pricing and private-school choice, and has directed much of his attention to government-imposed standards and tests.
Then there are Ravitch’s cheap shots against the free market, including the implication that deregulation led to the nation’s current economic woes and would be equally calamitous for education. “Deregulation contributed to the near-collapse of our national economy in 2008, and there is no reason to anticipate that it will make education better for most children.”
Again, Ravitch offers no support for her deregulation claim. She ignores powerful evidence, such as that assembled by Johan Norberg in his book “In Defense of Global Capitalism,” that free markets make almost everything better for the people they touch. Ravitch also skirts national and international research showing more freedom leads to better educational outcomes.
To be fair, standards-based reforms and school choice deserve some criticism.
Standards-and-accountability efforts such as No Child Left Behind–which Ravitch rightly repudiates–have repeatedly fallen victim to special-interest power and political expediency. But they also seem to be a natural stage in the evolution of public schooling. When local “democratic” accountability proves impotent, without school choice, parents and taxpayers have little recourse but to seek accountability from higher levels of government.
Ravitch’s main empirical objection to choice is that it hasn’t made much academic difference. But the problem is too little freedom under choice plans tried so far, not too much. With only a fraction of U.S. students able to access options, and with those options often hobbled by hostile politicians, the positive effects have naturally been small.
That said, unrealistic expectations are at least partly the fault of choice supporters, who have been too quick to label hamstrung programs as powerful. That has played right into the hands of people like Ravitch who seem to dislike educational freedom primarily for ideological, not empirical, reasons.
But that choice advocates have overplayed their hand doesn’t make Ravitch right. Her assault on educational freedom is weak, and her devotion to public schooling fantastical. Her own work has made that clear.
Rating: 1 / 5
#5 by Loyd E. Eskildson on April 6, 2010 - 7:08 pm
Author Diane Ravitch is a former Assistant Secretary of Education well-known for her former support of conservative prescriptions for America’s public schools – smaller schools (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), improved accountability (eg. local control; increased principal authority; annual norm-referenced testing for all pupils), school choice (charter schools, public school open enrollment), privatization, and deregulation. Market reforms brought particular appeal to Dr. Ravitch and others – instead of dealing with problems such as how to teach reading, one could simply focus on managing incentives that let Adam Smith’s invisible hand work. She has now concluded that these conservative proposals have not been cure-alls — citing initially compelling favorable studies that had instead fallen victim to distortions involving differing pupil populations, teaching to the test, etc., as well as many others. She now supports the liberal ‘more of the same’ approach – more money for smaller class sizes, increased teacher pay, etc., and also focus on curriculum and methodology.
However, Dr. Chester Finn, also a former Assistant Secretary of Education, in ‘The End of the Education Debate’ (National Affairs, Winter 2010) is not so downcast on the failure of market reforms. He states, “These ideas are not misguided – just not powerful enough to force meaningful change and bring dramatically improved student achievement.” Example: President Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ allowed state standards to lower passing standards – defeating the whole purpose. Dr. Finn also concedes that school choice has lost some credibility because quality varies widely and many involved don’t know what they’re doing. However, he also contends that despite all the activity, energy, and money poured into education in recent decades, American test scores, graduation rates, and international rankings have remained essentially flat. Meanwhile, other nations have moved past us in college matriculation and completion rates.
So, what we’re left with is evidence that neither conservative nor liberal approach has worked, though the conservative approach has been tried less enthusiastically and for less time. The ‘good news’ is that both Dr. Ravitch and Dr. Finn have overlooked a simpler answer – substantially increased pupil and parental motivation, evidenced through working harder.
Dr. Ravitch cites the work of Mults and Martin (Boston College) summarizing lessons learned from decades of mathematics assessments in dozens of nations (the ones we do so poorly one): Success requires strong, rigorous effort, experienced teachers, willing students, and a community that values education. ‘There are no shortcuts or easy answers.’ Similarly, Dr. Finn observes that significantly longer school days at KIPP and High Technology High in San Diego got ‘the best results.’ Now add the findings of the late Dr. Harold Stevenson’s (Univ. of Michigan), whom I was privileged to meet.
Dr. Stevenson’s cross-cultural comparison of pupils in China (Beijing), Taiwan, Japan (Sendai), and the U.S. (Chicago and Minneapolis) provide outstanding and surprising insights on how to improve U.S. pupil outcomes. American elementary children are in school about 30 hours/week, vs. 44 for their Asian counterparts (after the 1st grade), for about half the days of the year – compared to 2/3 in Asia. Asian children’s attentiveness is boosted through 4 to 5, 10-15 minute recesses each day, vs. the Americans’ single recess of about 50 minutes.
Asian elementary pupils receive considerably more homework than Americans during the school year, as well as homework during vacation periods. Many also go to private school on weekends or during the summer – especially when preparing for high-stakes college-entrance exams. Asian class sizes range from 38-50 (much larger than in the U.S.), and responsibility for discipline rests largely with the students – especially the class leader, a position that rotates throughout the class. Parental involvement in Asian academics is minimal prior to age six – Asian pre-school and Kindergarten classes are primarily focused on the children enjoying themselves. Thus, U.S. pupils do somewhat better than most Asian pupils in the 1st grade. (Unfortunately, by the fifth grade the best American classes perform worse than the worst Asian classes.) Meanwhile, U.S. parents generally delegate learning responsibility to the school at this point, and express much greater satisfaction with their children’s’ progress than their Asian counterparts.
Asians, including parents, expect all pupils to succeed, and that the child’s effort is the prime determinant; Special Education has never been popular and exists only for the blind, profoundly deaf, or severely retarded. The U.S. view, however, is inconsistent – we generally believe that ability is the prime determinant of academic success (thus, are much less committed to homework), while at the same time believing that practice is necessary for sports, music, and dance success. Dr. Stevenson also found that all three Asian nations spend considerably less/pupil for K-12 education than the U.S.
Bottom-Line: Test Question – Choose:
A) ‘Liberal’ More of the Same (no improvement)
B)’Conservative’ More of the Same (no improvement)
C)Work Harder (great improvement).
(The correct answer is C).
Rating: 4 / 5