This week's book review:

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch

"Seasoned Argument--Needs to be Required Reading on Capitol Hill"

This week, the Chicago Tribune has been running a series of editorials calling for more vouchers, more teacher accountability, getting competitive, weeding out the bad teachers, giving kids a better chance at a good education, "dumping" failing schools, etc. Militaristic language. Take no prisoners. Seek and destroy. Etc. I should have seen all this coming years ago. I mean, it's no compliment to my intelligence that I had to have colleagues complain about Education Secretary Arnie Duncan for the past year now before I could truly share in their ire. "I mean, the guy ran the CTA!" a friend vented one day over lunch. "What were they thinking?"

"Well, he improved scheduling and budget issues," I intoned wisely, clutching that day's paper ("Duncan Named Ed Secretary: He Improved CTA Budgets and Schedules!" emblazoned on the front).

"Yeah, but if kids could be handled like a Metra line, we wouldn't have Head Start and Title I."

It is Duncan's sort of thinking about education, as per the Tribune's editorials, or John Stossel, or any number of well-meaning fools, that has aggravated me the most about public discussions concerning the profession that makes all other professions possible. "Dump" the crappy teachers (am I one of them? I don't think so, but then, I haven't yet seen my students' Prairie State averages compared with others'.) "Lose" the substandard schools (and do what? bring in outside experts? why not bring them in now? because we already did and the kids are still faililng?). In education, you gotta deliver, and if we were delivering, why, our kids would all be rocket scientists. You get a salary, don't you? For what, letting them fail? Get to work, pal. Some of us have "full time jobs" and we actually have to earn our living.

I know. I'm incredibly repressed. It makes me quite the hit at parties.

With this attitude, I picked up Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System, figuring it would soothe my troubled soul somewhat about how my profession has been maligned over the past few decades (it did) but also hoping it would give appropriate weight to the counter arguments mucking the problem up. Put it another way: What are the reformists doing right, what can we keep, and what do we need to ditch before it does further harm?

Ravitch's book doesn't read like a big "eff you!" to NCLB or anything, but that's because she was initially behind it. The lauded education historian trots out her thinking (briefly) early on about teacher and school accountability, the viability of school choice and the necessity for continued testing, but she's quick to point out what she saw wrong with it all. She's reliable. She's got no particular political agenda; she only wants what's best for schools, and by her way of thinking, the current rage about "school reform" will do but nothing to fix our beleaguered school system and educate our next generation.

Ravitch has plenty of hard evidence, and not all of it is conclusive, which she is the first to point out. She argues that, though the jury is still out concerning the effectiveness of vouchers and, to a lesser extent, charter schools, there's no conclusive evidence that they provide a better education, not when you look at test scores, attrition rates, selective enrollment practices and overall competence. "[Charter schools have:] demonstrated that youngsters from some of the toughest neighborhoods in the nation can succeed in a safe and structured environment, if they have supportive parents and are willing to work hard, spend long days in school, and comply with the school's expectations," she writes. "They can't throw out the kids who do not work hard or the kids who have many absences or the kids who are disrespectful or the kids whose parents are absent or inattentive. They have to find ways to educate even those students who do not want to be there. That's the dilemma of public education."

She labels No Child Left Behind, and Obama's current Race to the Top, as all stick, no carrot, quite rightly arguing that, if all we're out to do is "punish" bad teachers, shouldn't we be examining what these "punishments" will to do improve education for the students? (Not much, as it turns out, if anything). Teacher evaluations are notoriously spotty, based on a ridiculously small amount of time and an attempt to objectify something beyond the pale of subjectivity. In her discussion of teacher fallibility, I'm reminded of what Bill Maher said in a recent column: There are always going to be bad teachers. Even Yale has crappy teachers. They must--they gave us George Bush.

She even dissects philanthropists like Bill Gates and the Walton Family Foundation, calling them the "billionaire boys' clubs" and asserting that, even though these entrepreneurs are engaged in laudable and noble efforts, they are remarkably reluctant to keep educators in a position to police education. They prefer instead to rely on trends (smaller schools, for example) that, while not without merit, do not produce the immediate panacea they initially thought they would. For example, Gates at one point argued that a school full of teachers in the "top quartile" would "erase" the achievement gap between blacks and whites; an argument like that is like saying, well, why not fill the Chicago Police Department with Olympic triathletes with 180 IQs so we can erase crime?

Overall, Ravitch's point is to take down the "invisible hand" theory a peg or two in its applicability to education. She argues (and I tend to agree with her) that the principles of good business do not work as well with education. Tests are not nearly reliable enough an indicator of a child's education, to say nothing of a teacher's effectiveness (though we still need them as barometers, of course); reform, if it is to be successful, is a complex effort that will span years, without always showing tangible results. When doctors became judged on the well being of their patients, they stopped taking the terminally ill, the risky procedures, the patients who really needed care but weren't likely to pull through, because it would then reflect on the doctors' performance. The low-performers, likewise, or the delinquents, or the low-ability aren't likely to get top-notch teachers lining up to help them if those teachers are judged on their pupils' ability to get a 36 on their ACTs.

Ravitch has no tone of outrage or weariness, and she does not entirely scrap Milton Friedman. But in the end, her point is clear: You can't run a school like a Fortune 500 company. She calls for a content- and skills-based curriculum encompassing not just math and reading (those subjects most heavily tested), but one including science, the arts, literature, history, geography, civics, music. We've got to discard this inanity that it doesn't matter what you teach the kids as long as you teach them how to learn. That's crap, and the countries currently kicking our asses in education have never done it that way. Look at Finland: something like a 100 percent literacy rate, with across-the-board learning goals and a strong teacher's union. We can certainly do better as educators, but it doesn't all happen inside our classrooms.

Bravo, Professor Ravitch. Get the word out.

FURTHER READING:

Ravitch interviewed by Democracynow.org. Further history of the accountability movement and how she came to look at it the way she does now.