Educational Horizons, Vol. 88, No. 4, Summer 2010, p. 194-198
Published by Pi Lambda Theta
http://www.pilambda.org/styles/pilambda/defiles/v88-4.pdf
Book Review
The Death and Life of the Great
American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
by Diane Ravitch, Basic Books, 2010
Reviewed by David Klein
In The Death and Life of the Great
American School System, Diane
Ravitch offers a panoramic view of the past two decades of
precollegiate American education, a sharp critique of its current
course, and prescriptions for renewal. She takes aim at standardized
testing, punitive accountability, the “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB)
legislation with its narrow focus on reading and math, and most
especially the relentless drive toward privatizing the public schools.
The author confesses forthrightly to her own role in furthering those
trends. Explaining her change of heart, she writes, “I began to
question ideas that I once embraced, such as choice and accountability,
that were central to NCLB. As time went by, my doubts multiplied. I
came to realize that the sanctions embedded in NCLB were, in fact, not
only ineffective but certain to contribute to the privatization of
large chunks of public education.”
Illustrating the damage caused by corporate “reform,” Ravitch devotes
three chapters to the San Diego and New York City school systems. In
the 1990s, many prominent education leaders attributed rising test
scores in District 2, within the New York City school system, to the
mandated use of a child-centered reading program called “Balanced
Literacy” and the constructivist math programs “TERC” and “Everyday
Math,” along with high-stakes testing and school choice. Overlooked as
a more plausible explanation for improving test scores were the
demographics that gentrification of the district had altered.
Inspired by the so-called “District 2 miracle,” the San Diego Unified
School District (SDUSD) adopted the New York City model starting in
1998, but with even greater coercion. The San Diego business community
bankrolled its pro-business school board candidates, who in turn hired
Alan Bersin, a top-down superintendent with strong business connections
but no education experience. Even though San Diego schools were
outperforming the state of California as a whole, the new leadership
completely restructured the district, firing administrators and
teachers who questioned the SDUSD “Blueprint” and micromanaging the
rest. The Gates, Hewlett, and several other foundations, which
contributed millions of dollars to the takeover, conditioned their
support on retaining Bersin and Anthony Alvarado, his chancellor of
instruction, who had headed the District 2 schools in New York. The two
administrators required schools to use Balanced Literacy, Everyday
Math, and a similarly dubious high school physics program. By the time
of the next school board election, both Bersin and Alvarado had left
the district, amid much rancor and with San Diego test scores declining
relative to the rest of the state.
With the election of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and mayoral control of
schools, the same business model was implemented systemwide in New York
City, which has the nation’s largest school system. With the support of
corporate foundations, large high schools were split into smaller
schools, eliminating advanced courses, art and music classes,
vocational programs, and extracurricular sports. Charter schools
expanded, taking public buildings and otherwise receiving favorable
treatment over the district’s regular schools. As in San Diego, the
focus was almost entirely on reading and math, to the detriment of
other subjects.
Following those case histories, Ravitch devotes a chapter to NCLB, and
thereafter a chapter to the broader history of the choice movement,
which she traces back to Milton Friedman’s work in the 1950s.
Friedman’s radical free-market ideology has exerted enormous influence
in all spheres of the U.S. economy and beyond. In the case of
education, he was an early advocate of vouchers, the germ of the choice
movement that has since engulfed America’s education system. In its
current incarnation, as Ravitch describes it, “The new thinking—now
ensconced in both parties—saw the public school system as obsolete,
because it is controlled by the government and burdened by
bureaucracy.” She observes ironically that “at the very time that the
financial markets were collapsing, and as deregulation of financial
markets got a bad name, many of the leading voices in American
education assured the public that the way to educational rejuvenation
was through deregulation.” Here, Ravitch’s analysis parallels, and in
some respects serves as a companion volume to, Naomi Klein’s important
book The Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which traces the
consequences of free-market capitalism and Friedman’s ideas in other
parts of the U.S. and global economy.
Ravitch relies heavily on National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP) test scores, perhaps too much. In one chapter, “The Trouble with
Accountability,” she writes,
NAEP monitors trends; if the state says
its scores are rising but its scores on NAEP are flat, then the state
reports are very likely inflated. In a choice between the state’s
selfreported scores and an audit test, the public should trust the
audit test. (p. 162)
The argument here is plausible, but there are also reasons not to trust
the NAEP exams. The prerequisites of the NAEP math questions for fourth
and eighth grade are minimal. They allow the use of calculators on a
substantial portion of the exams. Some questions, which closely
resemble IQ test items, do not measure math achievement, especially the
questions that ask students to complete a pattern or to fill in
geometric shapes with other geometric shapes, like puzzles. Some test
insignificant vocabulary only; some are so vague they require guessing
the intent of the questions. The NAEP exams favor students who have
used constructivist math programs with little
substance but a greater emphasis on patterns, pictures, and other
low-level content. If the NAEP math exams are testing IQ more than math
achievement, that could explain why NAEP scores are flat while at least
in some instances state achievement scores have increased.
Death and Life’s penultimate
chapter, “The Billionaire Boys Club,”
tracks the involvement and many underreported failures of the corporate
foundations—which Ravitch appropriately describes as “bastions of
unaccountable power”—in the nation’s schools. She provides plenty of
ammunition to support her warning:
American education has a long history
of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current
obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst
of them, for
it threatens to destroy public education. (p. 222)
In the final chapter, “Lessons Learned,” the author offers her own
recommendations for improving education. “As one innovation follows
another,” she drolly observes, “teachers may be forgiven if from time
to time they suffer an acute case of reform fatigue.” Drawing a lesson
from earlier chapters, she warns,
Our schools will not improve if we
continually reorganize their structure and management without regard
for their essential purpose. Our educational problems are a function of
our lack
of educational vision, not a management problem that requires the
enlistment of an army of business consultants. (p. 225)
Schools will not improve, she further notes, “if we use them as
society’s all-purpose punching bag, blaming them for all the ills of
the economy, the burdens imposed on children by poverty, the
dysfunctions of families, and the erosion of civility.” Ravitch makes
it clear that she does not seek to abolish standardized tests, but
warns that American education cannot be improved by “the blind worship
of data.”
The challenge for our generation, she argues, is “to create a
renaissance in education” that goes “well beyond the basic skills that
have recently been the singular focus of federal activity, a
renaissance that seeks to teach the best that has been thought and
known and done in every field of endeavor.” There is no simple recipe
to achieve that, but she offers several ingredients, the most important
of which is to “improve curriculum and instruction and to improve the
conditions in which teachers work and children learn.” Having a
curriculum, she acknowledges, is not a “silver bullet,” but its absence
is fatal to the mission of schools. Ravitch only obliquely acknowledges
the damage caused by whole language learning and constructivist (a.k.a.
fuzzy) math programs forced on schools collectively by senior
administrators, university professors of education, funding agencies,
and national education leaders during the past quarter-century. She
glosses over that when she writes,
Our schools will not improve if elected
officials intrude into pedagogical territory and make decisions that
properly should be made by professional educators. . . . Nor should the
curriculum of the schools be the subject of a political negotiation
among people who are neither knowledgeable about teaching
nor well educated. (p. 225)
By way of counterpoint, it was, after all, the intellectually vacuous
reading and math programs imposed by professional educators that led
parents of schoolchildren, mathematicians, scientists, engineers, a few
courageous teachers, and ultimately politicians to oppose those
programs and to try to insert content into the curriculum. Public
opposition to the programs in turn paved the way for the “army of
business consultants” to gain control.
America’s schools have thus been caught in a giant pincer movement
between the anti-intellectualism and incompetence of senior
administrators, education professors, and their allies on the one hand,
and the coercion and incompetence of the “billionaire boys club” and
its many acolytes on the other. Worse, the two groups do not really
work in opposition to each other; they work in tandem, supporting each
other’s goals.
Ravitch hints at this alliance with her term “left-right strategy,”
which appears twice in the text by my count, but this formidable union
is not adequately probed. How can schools truly reform? Ravitch’s
solution is to return control to “professional educators” in the “hope
that the curriculum wars have ended, not in a victory for either side,
but in a truce.” But given education leaders’ nearly one hundred-year
history of antipathy to academic content—brilliantly documented in her
previous work, Left Back—are
there really no better alternatives?
The Death and Life of the Great
American School System should be read
by anyone who seeks to improve American education. It is a major
contribution by America’s leading historian of education, and it might
mark the beginning of a new era in education.
References
Klein, D. 2007. “A
Quarter Century of U.S. ‘Math Wars’ and Political
Partisanship,” BSHM Bulletin 22: 22–33.
Klein, N. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
New York: Metropolitan Books.
Ravitch, D. 2000. Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. New
York: Simon and Schuster.