#ravitch

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‘The Worst-Case Scenario’: New York’s Subway Faces Its Biggest Crisis

The nation’s largest urban transit system is seeking billions more in federal aid but may have to consider drastic measures, including postponing critical improvements.

[kenacks]

‘The Worst-Case Scenario’: New York’s Subway Faces Its Biggest Crisis

The nation’s largest urban transit system is seeking billions more in federal aid but may have to consider drastic measures, including postponing critical improvements.

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The Two Faces of American Education

From the New York Review of Books, by Andrew Delbanco

In order to agree that America’s schools ought to be better (Ravitch), we don’t have to believe that they are worse than ever (Rhee). We don’t have to think, as Rhee does, that “great” teaching is a magic bullet in order to agree with Ravitch that the training of teachers ought to be more rigorous and that our nation needs “a stable workforce of experienced professional educators” who receive good compensation and respect. Rhee is right that our schools could use some shaking up. Ravitch is right that “the wounds caused by centuries of slavery, segregation, and discrimination cannot be healed by testing, standards, accountability, merit pay, and choice.”

This article examines the philosophies of two voices in American education, Diane Ravitch and Michelle Rhee.  Rhee (who heads a lobbying organization) is a proponent of charter schools, privatization, and testing-based accountability who dismisses the effects of structural inequality.  Ravitch (described as "arguably our leading historian of primary and secondary education") emphasizes the importance of addressing poverty alongside education reform, as well as a stable workforce of better trained, experienced educators who receive "good compensation and respect."

Read it here and click below for more quotes.

" “The public schools,” ...“are working very well for most students.” She points out that over the last few decades high school drop-out rates have declined. Average test scores have risen, if modestly. Nor is it clear, as often assumed, that American children lag significantly behind their foreign counterparts in science proficiency.

But if Ravitch disputes prevailing assumptions, she does not gloss over the fact that school performance by the large minority of American children who grow up poor or in segregated neighborhoods is disproportionately weak. On the contrary, she thinks that their plight is a national scandal, that today’s school reformers are misguided in their efforts to redress it, and that, along with the persistence of poverty and residential segregation, we should be alarmed by the current reform movement itself."

"Diane Ravitch not only sides with Rhee’s critics; she surpasses them in her condemnation, which borders on contempt. Here is her summary of Rhee’s legacy to the Washington schools: “cheating, teaching to bad tests, institutionalized fraud, dumbing down of tests, and a narrowed curriculum.”2 The reference to cheating is to an improbable rise in passing rates on reading tests during Rhee’s first two years (in the case of one school, the rates almost doubled). Although an investigation by the D.C. inspector general did not determine exactly what happened, it found that teachers in at least one school, under intense pressure to show good test results, erased wrong answers and substituted correct ones."

"Ravitch describes that approach, aptly, as “testing mania.” Tests, she thinks, can be useful diagnostic instruments, but as a high-stakes method for evaluating teachers and schools, they create more problems than they solve. She quotes Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond (who was Arne Duncan’s chief rival to become President Obama’s secretary of education) that teacher ratings based on tests “largely reflect whom a teacher teaches, not how well they teach.” Conflating test scores with teacher quality has the effect, Ravitch writes, of punishing “teachers for choosing to teach the students with the greatest needs,” while encouraging them to “spend more time with the students who will respond to their coaching and to spend less time with those who will not.” The emphasis on test scores exacerbates rivalry, discourages teamwork, and undermines morale."

"[Rhee's] fervor for competition exemplifies what is fast becoming the national education dogma, which boils down to a few variations on a single theme: (1) Students should compete for test scores and their teachers’ approval. (2) Teachers should compete for “merit” rewards from their principal. (3) Schools should compete for funding within their district. (4) School districts should compete for budgetary allocations within their state. (5) States should compete for federal funds."

"For one who grew up, as I did, in the 1960s and 1970s, it is strange to hear such faith in the salutary power of competition from someone who calls herself “radical.” That word once implied deep discontent with the basic structure of society and a revolutionary zeal to overturn it, beginning with the distribution of wealth. Now it apparently means the determination to remake public institutions on the model of private corporations."

"In this respect, too, Rhee’s book is a representative document of our time. She wants to bring financial incentives, rewards, and penalties into a bureaucratic system that she regards as dysfunctional and complacent. She wants to save it from itself by the infusion of entrepreneurial energy. In this sense, too, her approach to school reform is part of a trend that has been building since the 1980s to introduce private competition (in police, military, and postal services, for example) where government was once the only provider."

"Vouchers were first proposed in their modern form in 1955 by the free-market economist Milton Friedman.4 For groups seeking to escape what they regarded as the coercive culture of public schools, it was an attractive idea. It appealed to Catholics resentful of paying taxes to support schools to which they did not wish to send their own children, and to southern whites who wished to withdraw their children from public schools during the first phase of forced integration."

"As for charters, Ravitch notes the irony that the idea was first brought to public notice in the late 1980s by Albert Shanker, the longtime president of the teachers’ union. What Shanker had in mind was small collaborations of teachers interested in helping troubled students by moving them into a sort of school-within-a-school that would be a laboratory for teaching experiments and that might be expanded if proven successful.5"

"Among lobbyists who favor maximum freedom of action for charters is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—the same organization, supported by the Koch brothers, that drafted the legislative proposal on which Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law was based."

"Because some charter schools—or networks of schools under centralized management—enjoy generous funding from private donors, they have the potential to support students and families in ways that go far beyond the scope of what schools dependent solely on public funding can possibly do. The leaders among them, such as the Promise Academy and the KIPP schools, provide what Ravitch calls, approvingly, “wraparound services”—prenatal counseling for expectant mothers, programs for preschoolers, longer school days, after-school and summer activities, and other support services urgently needed in low-income neighborhoods. Children whose families do little to encourage them to learn can greatly benefit from such services."

"Her central concern is that pressure to show quick improvement in test results will create a “publicly funded dual school system”—one, consisting of some charter schools, will mainly appeal to the “motivated and willing”; the other, including public schools, will serve the “rejects.” It is by no means clear that large investments in charter schools will turn out to be money well spent."

"Ravitch, too, is indignant—at the callow arrogance of those who describe poverty as an “excuse” for not performing better in school. She is outraged by the persistence of poverty and its terrible effects: low birth weight with the associated risks of cognitive deficit, asthma, and the neurological effects of lead poisoning, among other debilitating conditions. She reminds us that poverty damages, often irretrievably, children who start school already hurt by having lived amid angry, often poorly educated adults prone to violence, having been parked in front of TV and tended by exhausted caretakers who rarely speak in complex sentences or about anything beyond the fraught incidents of day-to-day life. This fall, on the south side of Chicago, thousands of children are walking to and from school on streets lined with armored police trying to protect them from crossfire between warring gangs. Of course a good school can be a haven in such a setting, and good teachers can try to show children an alternative world, but it is foolish to overestimate their power to transform the lives of frightened and, inevitably, hardened children"

"Without citation, Rhee mentions a Harvard study showing the durable effects on “kids who had just one effective teacher in their lifetime” (p. 142). Ravitch’s view of “great” teachers is that “there is no evidence that they exist in great numbers or that they can produce the same feats year after year for every student” (p. 101). She cites multiple studies in her endnotes. For an extended discussion of excessive faith in education as the remedy for economic and social problems, see W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson, The Education Gospel: The Economic Power of Schooling (Harvard University Press, 2004.) ↩"

"Ravitch, born in the late 1930s, looks back at the 1960s and 1970s and sees something different. She sees the achievement gap narrowing between black and white students at a time of increased government support for early-childhood education, improving economic opportunities for black families with the help of antidiscrimination laws and jobs programs, and federal funds allocated to schools that enrolled poor children, rather than according to comparative performance on tests. In short, she sees President Johnson’s Great Society policies as a force for progress."

"She acknowledges that initiatives such as TFA have helped elevate the prestige of public-school teaching by attracting talented young college graduates. But she stresses the value of long experience, and thinks that teaching as a professional career is undermined when eager young recruits drop in for a few years before dropping out in order to move on to something more lucrative or prestigious.7 In short, Rhee wants to bust the union while Ravitch wants to strengthen it as an “advocate for better working conditions and better compensation for its members,” since “better working conditions translate into better learning conditions for students.”"

[oldwordsbest]

When we are too certain of our opinions, we run the risk of ignoring any evidence that conflicts with our views. It is doubt that shows we are still thinking, still willing to reexamine hardened beliefs when confronted with new facts and new evidence.

Death and Life of the Great American School System -- Diane Ravitch

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The Daily Show 2013 10 30 Diane Ravitch

Video Rating: 5 / 5

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How could they have foreseen the social disintegration that would force upon the school the roles of parent, minister, policeman, social worker, psychiatrist and babysitter?

Diane Ravitch in reference to the founders of the common school movement 

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DIANE RAVITCH'S BLOG

Why Did David Letterman Invite Only TFA for Teacher Appreciation Week? dianerav This teacher noticed with cha­grin that David Let­ter­man invit­ed ten Teach for Amer­i­ca teach­ers to deliv­er his top ten rea­sons for Teacher Appre­ci­a­tion week. Some­what in Let­ter­man’s defense, I have to say that the top ten rea­sons, which were most­ly sar­don­ic and cyn­i­cal, did not reflect much cred­it on teach­ers or on the kids who deliv­ered the lines.

I con­clude that David Let­ter­man saw no rea­son to express appre­ci­a­tion for teach­ers.

Our elites have gone bonkers. How else can you explain their fas­ci­na­tion with young col­lege grad­u­ates who agree to teach for only two years as the very best way to improve edu­ca­tion? Their “sac­ri­fice” is only tem­po­rary; soon they will be in grad­u­ate school or law school or work­ing for Gold­man Sachs, leav­ing behind their measly teacher pay.

How would our elites (talk­ing to you, Char­lie Rose, and to you, edi­to­r­i­al boards and cor­po­rate chief­tains) feel about hand­ing for­eign pol­i­cy over to the recruits in the Peace Corps instead of the sea­soned diplo­mats in the For­eign Ser­vice? The kids are alright, but why are they cel­e­brat­ed instead of cel­e­brat­ing the three mil­lion plus women and men who make a career of teach­ing?

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For all I appreciate Ravitch’s coming out stance on testing and accountability, I do not embrace her recommendations at the end of her 2010 book. Although I agree with this statement in many ways, ie “the way to improve schools is to improve curriculum and instruction and improve the conditions in which teachers work and children learn ...” (225), her approach to curriculum here still focuses essentially on delivery of "core" content -- and I would push back both on this idea of delivery as well as this idea of "core." Within this vision too she imagines a truce in the "culture wars" which I would say is also highly questionable, especially within a frame of delivery/consumption. Michael Apple writes that within the dynamics of knowledge, power and teaching in education "is a very real set of relationships among those who have economic, political, and cultural power in society on the one hand and the ways in which education is thought about, organized, and evaluated on the other" in his preface to his book Ideology and Curriculum (2004).

I also think her conceptualization of a standardized curriculum narrows what is possible as well as what I believe is actually urgently necessary. At least at the time of writing of this book, she doesn’t seem take into account the digital meditated and networked world of knowledge within/among which we now need to think about education and schooling. However the environment in which we think about school and knowledge has fundamentally shifted and changed since the beginning of her story. Mimi Ito, author of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Youth Living and Learning with New Media, in a speech at the American Association for School Library Conference in October 2011 says,

… the world around the classroom has also changed dramatically. Established cultural institutions like the textbook, the teacher, or the encyclopedia aren’t the critical passage points for knowledge anymore. Kids are immersed in a networked knowledge economy of free flowing information and constant social connectivity.

Again, I am influenced in my thinking by my work in the field of digital media and learning. Most recently reading the Connected Learning Research report, the authors write that “Today’s American youth are entering a labor market strikingly different from earlier generations.” 

Regardless of which job forecasts win out, we anticipate a future of heightened competition for good jobs, and a reduction in the wage premium gained by education. In this context, a neo-liberal vision of a market-driven education system is far more likely to yield a permanent two-track system than an environment in which opportunity and outcomes are widely shared across the citizenry. In order to pursue an educational reform agenda that is oriented towards equity, we need to confront these market realities as well as take into account the highly unequal educational playing field dominant and non-dominant youth encounter. Our educational system will fail those young people who it most needs to serve without solutions that look to education as a way of building capacity and meaningful participation rather than as a pipeline to a shrinking sets of opportunities.

I am also influenced by sophisticated curriculum development work that I have seen teachers I work with created and iterate over time. Curriculum is a "complicated conversation" (Ellsworth) and always reflects larger trends and influences in the society at larger (both explicit and hidden) ... so I don't agree with Ravitch that is is the domain of educational professionals versus teachers (note: I'm not sure I even understand this distinction btw, so that's a question) or "the what" versus "the how," (as she puts it on 226) and I'd be interested in discussing that more.

To support a conversation around curriculum, I found this post by former principal Frank Murphy in the Philadelphia School Notebook, which takes a historical view and shows the circular nature of the impact of “reforms” on curriculum and instructional control over the last decade in Philadelphia. And comments here by educators like Christina Puntel and others, make suggestions about directions to go that reach back historically to a time when teachers were in charge of their own curriculum and instruction decisions. These strike me as key pieces to hold onto as we move forward.

What did we know in the field from before NCLB about this curriculum and instruction? And what do we need to keep learning in order to move forward, in the name of equity and democracy, within radically changed and changing social, economic and educational environments?