Conservative Education Scholar's About-Face

[Ahso!]

Diane Ravitch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, a long time advocate of conservative values regarding public education has been changing her views on 'no child left behind', 'charter schools' and 'privatization' of our school system.

Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling.

Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups.

“School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ ” Dr. Ravitch said in an interview.

Dr. Ravitch is one of the most influential education scholars of recent decades, and her turnaround has become the buzz of school policy circles. She says privatizing and religion-izing (my word) our schools is dangerous.In 2005, she said, a study she undertook of Pakistan’s weak and inequitable education system, dominated by private and religious institutions, convinced her that protecting the United States’ public schools was important to democracy.

She remembers another date, Nov. 30, 2006, when at a Washington conference she heard a dozen experts conclude that the No Child law was not raising student achievement.

These and other experiences left her increasingly disaffected from the choice and accountability movements. Charter schools, she concluded, were proving to be no better on average than regular schools, but in many cities were bleeding resources from the public system. Testing had become not just a way to measure student learning, but an end in itself.


In her latest talk on education, Ms Ravitich was given a standing ovation by schoold superintendents. But Dr. Ravitch is finding many supporters. She told school superintendents at a convention in Phoenix last month that the United States’ educational policies were ill-conceived, compared with those in nations with the best-performing schools.

“Nations like Finland and Japan seek out the best college graduates for teaching positions, prepare them well, pay them well and treat them with respect,” she said. “They make sure that all their students study the arts, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages, the sciences and other subjects. They do this because this is the way to ensure good education. We’re on the wrong track.”

The superintendents gave Dr. Ravitch a standing ovation.

“We totally agreed with what she had to say,” said Eugene G. White, superintendent of the Indianapolis Public Schools. “We were amazed to see that she’d changed her tune.”


Full Story: Leading Scholar?s U-Turn on School Reform Shakes Up Debate - NYTimes.com

[Saint_]

Ahso!;1294432 wrote:

She says privatizing and religion-izing (my word) our schools is dangerous.


Amen to that and for all the reasons that she has stated. First of all, it's absolutely true that charter schools are not performing any better than regular schools. What's interesting about that is that they should be doing WAY better.

When you get to cherry-pick your students, refuse any special needs or learning disabled kids, and cater to the rich demographic neighborhoods, your school should be head and shoulders above the poor public schools that take on all comers, rich, poor, SPED, or destitute. (Including illegals?)

So why aren't they? Well, it points to a deeper crisis in America... the family and the culture of education in the homes. When families don't read together, when there is no expectation of "You WILL graduate and go to college," when a child can ditch 85 days of school with the parent's knowledge and if not support, at least apathy, then it's no wonder that our kids aren't getting educated.

I've been a teacher for 18 years and I can tell you that schools are trying harder, working smarter and better, and reaching out further than ever before. There's just one problem... the kids aren't at school. Today, I have 11 students present and 17 absent from my first hour. The kicker? It's the semester final day.:-5