A once-great education scholar rejects everything she previously believed.
OZIER MUHAMMAD/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
Ravitch sees school reform today as a plot by private interests to destroy public education.
Education writer and activist Diane Ravitch
is very angry these days. She’s convinced herself and her followers that
elements of the American corporate elite are working to destroy the
nation’s public schools, the indispensable institution that has held our
republic together for more than two centuries. According to Ravitch,
these fake reformers—the “billionaire boys’ club,” as she calls them—are
driven by greed: after destroying the schools and stigmatizing
hardworking teachers, she says, they want to privatize education and
reap the profits from the new market.
Heading Ravitch’s corporate enemies list are superrich
philanthropists such as Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Walton family, and
Michael Bloomberg, who’ve promoted the hated ideas. Equally despised are
the education officials and politicians carrying out their dirty
work—reformers such as ex-Washington, D.C., public schools’ chief
Michelle Rhee, former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein,
former Florida governor Jeb Bush, and education secretary Arne Duncan
(and, by implication, his boss, the president, too).
A few years ago, Ravitch grew so troubled about the purported threat
to the public schools that she went through an amazing life change for a
73-year-old historian, whose previous career had been spent writing
scholarly books. She reinvented herself as a vehement political
activist. Once one of the conservative school-reform movement’s most
visible faces, Ravitch became the inspirational leader of a radical
countermovement that is rising from the grass roots to oppose the
corporate villains. Evoking the civil rights movement and Martin Luther
King, Ravitch proclaims that the only answer to the corporate
school-reform agenda is to “build a political movement so united and
clear in its purpose that it would be heard in every state Capitol and
even in Washington, D.C.” The problem is that Ravitch’s civil rights
analogy is misplaced; her new ideological allies have proved themselves
utterly incapable of raising the educational achievement of poor
minority kids.
Ravitch first entered the education-reform wars in 1974 with her well-received
The Great School Wars,
a history of New York City’s public schools. She was then a research
fellow and lecturer at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Teachers
College was and remains a progressive-education bastion, but Ravitch
brought a moderate, centrist perspective to exploring the public
schools’ problems. She launched her writing career at publications such
as the neoconservative
Commentary and
The New Leader.
Politically, she was basically a Henry “Scoop” Jackson Democrat. The
sixties New Left and counterculture seemed to have passed her by. In her
book on the city schools, she scorned “limousine liberals” like New
York mayor John Lindsay and the Ford Foundation for creating
experimental, “community-controlled” school districts and turning them
over to black nationalists, with disastrous results.
Ravitch gained wider prominence in the 1980s as she joined in the
criticism of the public schools unleashed by the Reagan administration’s
1983
Nation at Risk report, with its frequently quoted warning:
“The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded
by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a
nation and a people.” Five years later, she coauthored, with Chester E.
Finn,
What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? The well-researched book’s
answer: not much. The authors blamed American students’ ignorance partly
on the fact that public schools lacked a “coherent literature
curriculum.” Indeed, Ravitch began calling for voluntary national
standards and championed the teaching of rich academic content
knowledge, even in the early grades, and she became associated with E.
D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge movement. In his 1987 bestseller,
Cultural Literacy,
Hirsch credited Ravitch for providing “the single greatest impetus for
writing this book” and for suggesting the title. Ravitch soon found
herself facing nasty attacks from progressive educators for her
“elitism” and for championing “dead white males.”
Though still nominally a Democrat, Ravitch accepted an offer from
newly elected president George H. W. Bush to become his assistant
secretary of education. Her official assignment was to develop voluntary
national standards, but she also came to agree with the
administration’s support for school choice. When Ravitch’s Bush stint
was over, the Teachers College mandarins, offended by her making common
cause with reactionary Republicans, told her not to bother reapplying
for her old job. Instead, she became a fellow at the Brookings
Institution and wrote a book on national standards. Though the federal
government couldn’t require the states to adopt such standards, she
concluded, students would benefit if the states voluntarily moved toward
them.
Ravitch received financial support for her scholarly work from the
conservative John M. Olin Foundation and eventually joined the Koret
Task Force at the Hoover Institution. The education-reform movement had
acquired a new star, a Democrat supporting almost the entire Republican
education agenda—vouchers, more testing, teacher accountability, and
higher standards. Ravitch even served on George W. Bush’s 2000
presidential campaign as an education advisor, though she withdrew
before the election.
Sometime around 2007, Ravitch began having
second thoughts about the free-market components of education reform. In
a public debate at Hoover, she teamed with Hirsch to argue in favor of a
resolution affirming that “true school reform demands more attention to
curriculum and instruction than to markets and choice.” In a
controversial 2008
City Journal essay, I argued something similar, and Ravitch came to my defense, publishing a short
City Journal piece
endorsing “a coherent, year-by-year progression of studies in science,
history, literature, geography, civics, economics, and the arts” in the
public schools. In history, she explained, students in the early grades
would “learn about the great deeds of significant men and women, study
distant civilizations, and begin to understand chronology and the
relation between causes and effects.” Ravitch also urged reformers “to
view the evidence with open minds and be prepared to change course in
light of new evidence.”
Ravitch elaborated on these arguments in her best-selling 2010 book,
The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
She explained there how “new evidence” had led her to change her mind
on vouchers and on evaluating teachers by their students’ test scores,
but she still expressed hope that the American people would support
national standards and “a sequential, knowledge-rich curriculum.”
Ravitch had also initiated a series of written exchanges about key
education issues with the prominent progressive educator Deborah Meier.
“Bridging Differences” ran in
Education Week for almost five
years. Ravitch noted at the series’ outset that she “was wrong to
support choice as a primary mechanism for school reform.” But throughout
the colloquy, she held firm against the progressive-education agenda on
issues such as curriculum and standards. It could not have been an easy
situation for Ravitch. She now stood apart from both the Right and the
Left, loyal only to the evidence—or so she claimed.
Then, Ravitch abruptly took yet another dramatic spin and wound up
surrendering abjectly to Meier, champion of social-justice teaching and
other progressive fads. For the progressives, it was similar to the
defection of a top general from the enemy side. Ravitch later said that
Meier had convinced her that she was wrong about everything. Not only
had Ravitch changed her mind about school choice and testing; she had
closed her mind to the possibility of
any successful reforms,
including national standards, curriculum, and classroom instruction. And
anyone who persisted in supporting such “de-forms,” she maintained,
must either be a reactionary or (like Duncan, presumably) a dupe of the
reactionary corporate-reform movement. In Ravitch’s new lexicon, the
word “reformer” became pejorative.
In April 2012, Ravitch launched a blog that
today serves as a propaganda hub for the national anti–corporate reform
coalition. By her account, over the past year and a half, she has had 6
million page views, published more than 5,000 posts, and received more
than 100,000 reader responses. Her comments about the latest atrocities
perpetuated against children in the name of reform appear up to ten
times daily, seven days a week, and almost 52 weeks a year. She hammers
reformers for backing teacher evaluations based on student test scores,
closing failing schools, expanding charter schools, and trying to impose
a “nationalized” Common Core curriculum on the states, among other
policies.
The blog has all the subtlety of an Occupy Wall Street poster. This
past Labor Day, for example, Ravitch posted the words of militant union
songs like “Joe Hill” and “Which Side Are You On?” and lamented that
teacher unions don’t have
enough power or influence in
America—though try telling that, say, to a California politician who
dares oppose them. “In education, unions are being crushed,” Ravitch
writes, “and there is no one to advocate for them when the Governor and
Legislature cut the budget for education. Teachers get pink slips, kids
get larger classes and lose the arts, library, and much else that used
to be taken for granted as a basic in American schools.” “What is
happening to our country?” Ravitch wailed in another post. “Why are the
bankers and the major corporations blaming teachers and public schools
for problems they not only created but benefit from? Why do they think
that adoption of the Common Core standards or the privatization of
public schools will heal the deep economic and social problems caused by
the outsourcing of our manufacturing base and deep income inequality?”
Ravitch uses her blog to publicize and organize support for
antireform school board candidates from Rochester to Los Angeles. She
recently wrote an impassioned endorsement of Bill de Blasio, the most
radical of the Democrats running in the New York mayoral primary and the
eventual winner. (The United Federation of Teachers supported the more
moderate Bill Thompson.) Ravitch’s self-important announcement came with
a drumroll: “After much deliberation, I have decided to support Bill de
Blasio for mayor of New York City.” It’s a reflection of Ravitch’s
success in her activist role that the de Blasio camp coveted her
support. Her endorsement likely influenced some voters, particularly
teachers.
The latest incarnation of Diane Ravitch, then, depicts a Manichaean
struggle for the future of America’s children. On one side are the
forces of darkness, the malefactors of wealth, scheming to kill the
public schools. On the other side are the forces of light, including all
the courageous parents, teachers, and ordinary Americans struggling to
preserve their precious schools. Any middle ground from which someone
might offer an independent, case-by-case evaluation of the policies most
likely to improve the schools is lost. As in the words of the union
song, all Ravitch wants to know is “Which Side Are You On?”
This crude, politicized approach isn’t going
to produce smart school policies. For starters, Ravitch’s central
premise about the school-reform movement is absurd. The philanthropists
financing the movement may have exaggerated the potential benefits of
some reforms and taken some wrong turns, but there’s no conspiracy to
destroy the public schools. The corporate reformers whom Ravitch sees as
a monolithic force disagree with one another about many education
issues. Some support vouchers; others don’t. Bill Gates went all in with
hundreds of millions of dollars to support the Common Core State
Standards; the Waltons demurred, suspicious of federal intervention in
education policy.
Actually, it is Ravitch’s sudden and unwarranted attack on Hirsch and
the Core Knowledge curriculum that will likely do the public schools
real harm. Just three years ago, Ravitch blurbed Hirsch’s
The Making of Americans as “the one book I would recommend to every legislator and school board member.” In her own book that year,
The Death and Life of the Great American School System,
she rightly observed that “students who have the benefit of [Hirsch’s]
sequential, knowledge-rich curriculum do well on the standardized tests
they must take. They do well on tests because they have absorbed the
background knowledge to comprehend what they read.”
Soon afterward, in a sign of what was to come, Ravitch resigned from
the Core Knowledge Foundation’s board, ostensibly because it entered
into a licensing agreement with Joel Klein’s private education company,
Amplify, to distribute its early-grade literacy curriculum to schools.
She suggested that Hirsch made the deal with Klein’s company because
“this is quite a goldmine.” She also decided that the Core Knowledge
reading curriculum adopted by New York State was bad for young children.
The curriculum’s requirement that children in the early grades learn
key facts about ancient civilizations was, Ravitch contended,
“developmentally inappropriate” and “a circus trick, an effort to prove
that a six-year-old can do mental gymnastics.” But the lessons Ravitch
found so disturbing were exactly the kind of curriculum she had praised
for almost all her professional career. As her
City Journal
article proposed, young students should “learn about the great deeds of
significant men and women [and] study distant civilizations.”
Ravitch now apparently agrees with the progressive-ed icon Jean
Piaget that children in the early grades shouldn’t be pressured with too
much academic learning. “I don’t care if my two grandsons—one now
entering second grade, the other not yet 1—have higher or lower scores
than children their age in California, Florida, Iowa, Finland, Japan,
Korea, or any other place you can think of,” she recently declared. “I
don’t think their parents care either. They care that their children are
healthy; are curious about the world; are loved; learn to love
learning; are kind to their friends and to animals; and have the
confidence to tackle new challenges. . . . Let’s all read
Walden,
read poetry, listen to good music, visit a museum, look at the stars,
and think more about what matters most in life. Let us see our children
not as global competitors, but as children, little human beings in need
of loving care and kindness.”
Too bad that poor minority parents can’t afford Ravitch’s newly
discovered educational romanticism. Their kids often enter school far
behind Ravitch’s middle-class grandchildren, and if they aren’t taught
lots of content knowledge in the early grades, they’re doomed to fall
further behind. They will never be able to read
Walden or understand poetry.
After Ravitch first announced her “change of
mind” on free-market reforms, she complained that some former
colleagues had launched ugly attacks against her. She was right to
object, but these days she engages in scurrilous denunciations of
anyone—liberal or conservative—not on board with her current antireform
positions. She was outraged, for instance, when
New York Times
columnist Bill Keller (no right-winger he) came out in favor of the
Common Core Standards, which she thinks the Gates Foundation forced on
states, and she struck back by posting (approvingly) the rant of a
leftist education blogger, Susan Ohanian:
Well, at least New York Times editorial remains
consistent, proving once again that you can lead a reporter to evidence
but can’t make him think. Keller was executive editor at the New York Times
from 2003–2011, where he was a leading supporter of the Iraq invasion.
Although he has since returned to his status as writer, he remains
infected by the Times editorial bias on education policy. It
seems significant that Keller’s father was chairman and chief executive
of the Chevron Corporation.
This is the classic ad-hominem style of radical-left political discourse.
Another tenet of the far Left is that progressives should have “no
enemies on the left,” and Ravitch apparently agrees. Thus, she has
praised the former Weather Underground terrorist and radical educator
William Ayers for his contributions to the anticorporate insurgency.
(She concedes that Ayers made some political “mistakes” in the sixties.)
Ravitch has also had kind words for leftist education activist and
onetime Ayers ally Mike Klonsky. On her blog, she recounted visiting two
universities in Chicago in 2010, with Klonsky as her host. “For me, the
fallen-away conservative, it was a trip getting to know Mike, because
he had long ago been a leader of the SDS, which was a radical group in
the 1960s that I did not admire. So meeting him and discovering that he
and his wife Susan were thoughtful, caring, and kind people was an
experience in itself.” Ravitch apparently didn’t know, or preferred not
to disclose, that Klonsky broke with Ayers’s Weather Underground faction
to create a Maoist-oriented party in the U.S. and then spent several
years in China during the horrific Cultural Revolution, attending state
dinners with the Great Helmsman.
Onetime admirers of Diane Ravitch recall her as a careful scholar and
a moderate. They may find it hard to make sense of her slash-and-burn
polemics and new political alliances. What they haven’t yet appreciated
is how much this rhetorical aggression is part of a deliberate strategy.
After all, there’s a new people’s education movement to build in
America, and nothing grows a movement faster than indignation directed
against the enemy.
Notwithstanding the time and energy she
devotes to her blog, Ravitch has managed to write another book about the
calamities of the school-reform movement:
Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. Published by Knopf, the book has a huge first printing of 75,000 and one week after release reached the
New York Times
bestseller list. It contains all the appropriate scholarly
apparatus—hundreds of footnotes and dozens of charts on
student-achievement trends from the federal government. But make no
mistake: this is primarily a political tract.
In a 350-page volume on twenty-first-century American education,
neither the Core Knowledge curriculum nor Hirsch bears mentioning. This
is no mere oversight; it’s a calculated omission that lets Ravitch frame
the current school-reform debate as a winner-take-all struggle between
those avaricious privatizers and the heroic defenders of the public
schools. While writing the book, Ravitch was surely aware that, as part
of its implementation of the national Common Core Standards, New York
had contracted with the Core Knowledge Foundation to develop the state’s
pre-K–2 reading curriculum. That project is now completed. Every New
York school will be able to use the Hirsch curriculum, and state
officials are strongly encouraging them to do so. The entire
grade-by-grade curriculum is also freely available on the Internet for
any school in the United States to utilize. The Diane Ravitch of old
would have welcomed all this; today’s version has written Core Knowledge
out of history and denounces the Common Core Standards as a gigantic
“hoax” that the privatizers have perpetuated on the American people
(how, exactly, the adoption of standards benefits privatization remains
fuzzy).
Reign of Error starts off with 20 short chapters detailing and
“correcting” all the reformers’ supposedly fraudulent claims. Anyone
reading Ravitch’s blog will find little new in her catalog of errors,
though school reformers should take some of her arguments
seriously—including that inner-city school-voucher programs haven’t yet
delivered on the promise of improved student achievement and that
evaluating teachers based on student test scores has encouraged cheating
and other undesirable classroom side effects.
Ravitch does add one new count to her indictment of school reform. In
a chapter called “The Facts About Test Scores,” she disputes the
reformers’ “crisis narrative” of declining academic performance, which
began with the
Nation at Risk report, whose conclusions she
accepted until three years ago. The Ravitch of 2013 argues that test
scores for American students in all age groups have steadily
improved for
the last 40 years and today stand “at their highest point ever
recorded.” To support this bold assertion, Ravitch cites data from the
highly respected National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—in
particular, NAEP’s “long-term trend assessment,” which tests a sample of
the country’s nine-year-olds, 13-year-olds, and 17-year-olds in math
and reading every four years.
Ravitch’s claim of across-the-board improvement on NAEP tests is
definitely new—and it’s also wrong. Even the NAEP graph included in the
book shows clearly that 17-year-olds showed no improvement in their
unimpressive scores from 1971 (when the tests began) to 2008. Further, a
new NAEP long-term assessment was released in June 2013 (probably too
late to be included in the book), adding four more years to the dismal
trend. According to the official NAEP report, “average reading and
mathematics scores in 2012 for 17-year-olds were not significantly
different from scores in the first assessment year.” Ravitch bases her
case for improvement solely on higher scores for nine-year-olds and
modest improvements among 13-year-olds. But these aren’t significant if
the gains disappear in high school and if students about to enter
college or the workforce—the end product of the public school
system—still can’t read or write very well, or at all.
Aside from the NAEP data, we can confirm that graduating seniors
these days know very little from the countless reports by universities
about the extent of remediation needed by entering freshmen, as well as
from books like Mark Bauerlein’s
The Dumbest Generation. Just
three years ago, Ravitch emphasized the same point. “Many reports and
surveys have demonstrated that large numbers of young people leave
school knowing little or nothing about history, literature, foreign
languages, the arts, geography, civics or science,” she wrote in
The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
Ravitch’s own recommendations for improving the schools, laid out in
Reign of Error’s
second half, are basically the same prohibitively expensive,
pie-in-the-sky programs that the education Left has advocated for
decades: smaller class sizes, universal prekindergarten, after-school
programs, and comprehensive health and nutrition services. Ravitch
doesn’t even try costing out her suggestions—the price tag would be in
the billions—or indicate where extra school funding might come from.
After all, the United States already ranks first in the world in K–12
education spending. Considering her politics these days, she probably
would begin with major cuts in the defense budget. If test scores are at
an all-time high, though, as Ravitch contends, why would we need to
pour billions more into the schools?
The widespread sense of how “dumb” the
country’s college freshmen are nowadays was a big reason the nation’s
governors called for the development of the Common Core Standards. It’s
also why it is imperative that the standards get implemented in the
states with fidelity to the Common Core document’s call for a curriculum
“intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content
knowledge within and across grades.” Ravitch once knew why content
knowledge is so important to improving literacy. In her book on the
appalling lack of knowledge of the nation’s 17-year-olds, she wrote that
“students who know the mechanics of reading but lack background
knowledge are handicapped as readers.”
Many valid criticisms can and have been made of the manner in which
the standards were adopted in many states, including the undue influence
of the Obama administration. As well, there’s no guarantee that states
and school districts will be successful in creating coherent,
content-rich school curricula. But these considerations are now somewhat
academic. A dramatic struggle is unfolding over the content that
teachers should actually be teaching in their classrooms. Educators who
support teaching strong content knowledge might have benefited from the
constructive criticism and wisdom of the Diane Ravitch of the not so
distant past. This could have been her moment, just as it is Hirsch’s.
But Ravitch has walked away from the struggle for a knowledge-based
curriculum. Instead, she is standing outside the schoolhouse doors with
her angry insurgent army of education progressives, protesting that the
Common Core is a fraudulent reform, a creation of the hated
corporations. (Ironically, just down the street, Tea Party activists are
also denouncing the Common Core, which they have renamed “Obama Core.”)
With strange new allies such as Deborah Meier, Susan Ohanian, and Mike
Klonsky, Ravitch is trying to tear down this once-in-a-lifetime national
effort to improve instruction, which could give disadvantaged children,
in particular, a better chance of meeting the challenge of higher
education.
After Ravitch’s many years of intellectual zigzagging, it’s a
travesty that she has ended up in solidarity with the destructive
radicals of the education Left. For poor kids, it’s a tragedy.
