The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

In "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education," Diane Ravitch provides a comprehensive, incisive, and fervent critique of the current decades long No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top reform movements.Ravitch produces conclusive data to support her transformation from an early supporter of test-based teacher accountability and the trend toward privatization of public schools to becoming a fervent critic and an advocate for education professionals. Her support for the No Child Left Behind Act gives her the unique perspective of someone who know and understands the good intentions and laudable goals of this crop of education reformers. Her career as a education historian makes her uniquely qualified to put this movement into perspective. Having seen NCLB fully implemented, she understands the negative impact of simplistic top-down bottom-line business models. With standardized tests as their underpinning, teaching becomes data collection. While the teacher is collecting the data, the student is learning to take tests.Once again, politicians and wealthy businessmen have foisted yet another ill-conceived reform on educators. Perhaps because almost everyone has "gone to school" at some point in their lives, they feel they know what needs to be done to "fix" public education. But as may seem obvious, while we have all been students, we have not all become public school teachers and administrators. Ravitch gives voice to those education professionals. She provides line after line of quotable material that educators will find reassuring and absolutely true.At times, the cumulative data and logic seemed repetitious; however, when repeated, it was for the most part included in a new context, applied to a different situation, and a careful reading rendered the data again relevant. As of this writing, aside from the inevitable attacks from right-wing ideologues, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education has accumulated hundreds of positive reviews in print and online. In skimming these reviews, I found one from a college student who was "required" to read the book. The student wrote that it was just "okay" and predictably gave it three stars, thus illustrating the difficulties in education. Of course students blanche at "requirements." You must "teach" it, make it come alive with life experience, make it relevant - good teachers do that. While the book may have been less than thrilling to the student, the learning experience becomes worthwhile. In the corporate business model, teaching means making sure the student passes an often unreliable standardized test. If the student does poorly on the fill-in-the-bubble test, then the teacher is "bad." This is obvious folly.Coincidentally, I wrote an article, "The Essence of Teaching and Learning," just prior to reading Ravitch's book and was delighted and amused about the commonality of our views. (I have since revised to reference her work.) In my article, I wrote, "The essence of teaching and learning lies in the hundreds of moments a day when students learn something as a result of the teacher's actions. What they learn depends on teacher experience, temperament, and creativity, but also on administrative leadership, curriculum, political demands, and parental influences. Additionally, learning is affected by the wealth of the district, background of individual students, class size, classmates, social dynamic of the class, and the physical class environment. And much more of course. It's easy to see how the variables increase exponentially."Additionally, because I have written fiction all my life, I logically use that medium to help shed light on an often misunderstood profession. My guess is that about ninety-nine percent of teachers are not overpaid laggards, as ultra right wing pundits want you to believe. As I try to show in my novel, "No Teacher Left Standing," this piling on of negative influences can create extremely tense situations that are overcome only by the devotion, tenacity and strength of teachers.Jeff May (Jeffrey Penn May), educator and author of  No Teacher Left Standing , married to a brilliant elementary school teacher.

I think in 50-100 years people will look back at the "Nation at Risk," NCLB, SOL, standardized test driven, charter school culture that has dominated education for the last 30 years and think it's as weird and incomprehensible as the Salem Witchcraft Trials were. How could a whole society go so totally insane? How could so many people who claimed to care passionately about educating children do so many stupid and self-destructive things? So many things that were self-evidently stupid?Diane Ravitch gives us part of the answer. Once an advocate (and leading architect) of the test-driven, "results-oriented" education now inflicted on nearly all our children, has finally come to her senses and written a brilliant book about the harm these ideas have done to education.She argues persuasively that the data-driven, results-oriented culture harms educators and students. She gives several case studies of much publicized examples (notably New York City) where city mayors took control and promised "results." The main effect seems to be a vast increase in spending on educational consultants. The actual results achieved by the Michelle Rhee's and Joel Klein's of the world have been modest, at best, despite the free hand and the millions in foundation dollars that has flowed into their school systems. And a lot of the results have involved students at the top end of the socioeconomic scale.She shows the insidious influence of the Gates, Broad, and Walton foundations and other members of the "billionaire boys club," rich businessmen who have adopted public education as their hobby. Most of them bring large amounts of money, an arrogant belief that "good things happen because important people like me make them happen," and a fixation on "results" (i.e., tests), data (i.e., massive spending on highly questionable data systems), "incentives" (i.e., bribing educators to get test scores up), and "identifying great teachers" (i.e., terrify teachers by threatening their jobs if test scores don't go up). These rich foundations are setting the agenda probably to a greater extent than the federal department of education and the direction isn't encouraging.She picks apart the idea that test scores indicate much of anything about the quality of teaching, the quality of the school, etc. Random variations from year make some of the "best" teachers one year the "worst" the following year.She thoroughly rebuts the myth of charter school excellence, showing that most charter schools cherry pick their student bodies and still post results no better than "come one, come all" public schools. Anyone who has been in a school for anything more complex than a photo opportunity knows that one of the main indicators of student success is whether the parents are involved constructively -- motivating them, letting them know how important their success is, making sure they do homework, setting a curfew, making sure they get to school. Socioeconomic status is key as well. Public schools take on anyone who registers. Charter schools ALWAYS get to rig their enrollment in some way, even if it's only requiring prospective students to come to an interview -- or register for a lottery. They BETTER get sensational results. All too often, they don't.Sadly, most of the so-called reformers, whether it's Bush, Obama, Arne Dnncan, or the members of the billionaires boys club who endow their experiments CLAIM that their main goal is to improve the educational prospects of vulnerable students. Ravitch documents that, totally unsurprisingly, the main results of the efforts of NYC chancellor Joel Klein, Bill Gates, and the rest is to drain off more and more of the motivated students to elite schools of one sort or another and leave behind vast and more underfunded "dropout factories," which then provide further evidence of the "failure" of the standard list of villains: unions, teachers, traditional high schools, boards of education, etc.Predictably, some of Ravitch's critics dismiss the book as simply teachers union propaganda. It's no such thing. Ravitch has no love for sweetheart union contracts but she does recognize that standardized tests and data systems do not educate anyone.But they sure can drain off billions of dollars and horribly distort the way we go about educating our children.

Diane Ravitich was originally a supporter, and even promoter, of the charter school movement in the US. That was until she became aware of it is negative consequences for both education and society more broadly. UK education is currently undergoing massive changes with the conversion of schools maintained by local authorities to independent state schools (Academies). Many of the objectives of this movement, as well as the arguments used to promote it are similar to those associated with the US charter school movement. Both Labour and Conservative politicians make positive references to the charter school movement but never enter into detail. Even less do they look at the devastating critique produced by Diane Ravitch. Everyone interested in the future of education in the UK should read this book as a warning about the direction in which our education system is currently headed.

An important book in which someone who was an early leader of the "measure and inspect everything" school effectiveness movement reflects on the limitations of that approach and explores how political imperatives have driven it far beyond its purpose and validity. Is American, but has high relevance to British situation - what is happening here is the American approach ten years later - just when the Americans are realising they need to change direction.

Diane is the World's foremost expert on education and her analysis perfectly describes the rotten rationale behind our current government's policies.