No surprise to me that she opposes President Obama's policies on public education: but in doing so, she's come to reject her earlier advocacy of NCLB and widespread testing. So big surprise to me, I agree with Diane Ravitch. http://www.salon.com/life/education/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2010/03/26/diane_ravitch_interview Diane Ravitch has spent a lifetime in school. She was the assistant secretary of education under George H. W. Bush and an early advocate of No Child Left Behind. Today, she's a research professor of education at New York University, a passionate critic of the system and an articulate, outspoken advocate for our saving our public schools. Her new book has the provocative title "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education." She's certainly got my attention. As a public school parent in New York City, where on Thursday, chancellor Joel Klein threatened to cut 8,500 teaching jobs -- 20 percent of which would come from the impoverished South Bronx -- I've been watching the ongoing fiasco in education reform with a mixture of fear, anger and outright disgust. In his announcement, Klein said he would fight Albany's mandate to cut jobs with a "last in, first out" strategy -- unsurprising given his longstanding promise to get rid of "bad" teachers. It doesn't take long, however, to notice how often Klein's criteria for career jeopardy seems to involve a higher salary and/or a class with lower test scores. At my own school, parents have heard our principal speak in meetings of removing particular teachers who make the most money -- while several of the tenured staff have suddenly found themselves written up for questionable infractions. It's a scenario being repeated all over the country -- earlier this month in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, entire faculties at low-performing schools faced the ax. On Thursday, a Savannah, Georgia, high school announced it was firing its whole staff. And California recently issued layoff notices to a staggering 30,000 teachers. All of which paints an incredibly grim prospect for parents, children and teachers within the public school system – especially families and communities servicing English language learners and special needs kids. Want to remove the teachers and close schools in the poorest, "lowest performing" areas? Want to hold every child, regardless of individual circumstances and aptitude, to the same standards? Gosh, what could go wrong there? Searching for solutions, I spoke recently with Ravitch about the crisis in our schools -- how we got here, and how we can dig ourselves out.
Long interview from Slate on her new book. I am damned impressed by Ravitch. We need more political figures willing to change their minds when reality proves their ideas inadequate. (I'm less impressed by the interviewer, who comes across as a knucklehead and who really should pare this interview down). http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/ Can you describe the process by which you changed your mind about education reform? Was it more of a sudden epiphany—the canonic conversion experience, like Paul being blinded by the light on the road to Damascus—or just a gradual change of heart? It was gradual. I think what happens is that over time you get to know all the arguments—all the arguments on your side, all the arguments on the other side—and you just say "Nah, they're wrong." And then at some point you think, Well, are they really wrong? What about this? Or Well, they're right about that. Or Maybe this thing I've been advocating for is wrong in this one situation. You start feeling the certainty begin to dissipate. I guess I started to see things that created a lot of chinks in my own intellectual defenses. I tend to be skeptical of things, and I found my skepticism turning toward the people that I was a part of and turning toward myself. Was there a moment where you first thought: "Uh-oh"? There were a number of moments, really, scenes of doubt. But one of them came about because of research I'd been asked to do about higher-education standards in Pakistan. What I discovered was that higher education wasn't the issue. The issue was that they have virtually no public-education system. So that gave me pause, because here I was running with people that were saying that public education is the problem. Do you think there was something about looking at familiar issues in a foreign context that freed you up to see things differently? Maybe. You know, here is a country that has a completely inadequate public-school system: So many of the kids that do go to school are in madrasas, and girls are not going to school at all. It made me think about the origins of American public education. I'd written about the history of the New York public schools and read lots of other histories of schooling, and it used to be that there was this hodgepodge of options—private tutors and church schools and so forth. Those who had some resources could take care of their kids, and those who had none—well, their kids didn't get an education. So there was something that resonated for me. The more we turn kids over to the private sector and erode public education, the more we're going back to pre-public-school times, and those were not good times for education in this nation. What other experiences nudged you along in your transformation? Seeing the results of testing, for one. There was a long period of time where I thought, what's wrong with testing? We test people all the time; you go to the doctor, you have tests. But as I saw the consequences begin to kick in, I realized, this isn't just testing. People are being punished because of test scores. We've created a system where Mrs. Smith is going to teach nothing but what's tested. The arts aren't tested and the sciences aren't tested, and the conservative response to that is, "Well, test everything." But the problem is—and this is another thing I found myself recoiling from—then you'll do nothing but test. People tend to scoff at anything that's subjective, but it's the essays and the projects that make it fun for kids and give them an opportunity to show comprehension. So that made me stop and think. And then, too, I became very outspoken in my criticism of Bloomberg, which created this tremendous tension between me and almost everyone else on the conservative side of the spectrum. What was the hardest part of changing your mind on these issues? I think the hardest thing is just to say you've made a mistake. If you can reach that juncture, which is very hard, then you can begin to understand how you got there. I'm not sure that I myself understand how I got there. I attribute it to having been in the [first] Bush administration. I didn't really have a strong position on choice and accountability when I started there, and I can see now how I was really shaped just by interchange with people. It's the social consensus; you're surrounded by people with the same ideas. You develop over the years a whole set of relationships with people who agree with you and you read the things on your side that say you're right, and you look at the things written on the other side and you say, "Oh, gosh, it's too bad they haven't seen the light."