5 Responses to “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education”

• By Mark Rutherford on Jul 27, 2010

  Diane Ravitch wants to wave a wand and send American education back to what it was in the 1950s – pretty good. She refuses to see that the quality of teachers has declined; that Albert Shanker, sadly, is long dead, and has been replaced by union leaders without the slightest concern for anything but making teachers impossible to manage and to fire; and that, left to their own devices, education authorities go for whatever idiotic ideas are currently fashionable, such as contructivist math. In this situation, accountability and testing, for all their weaknesses, are the only way to ensure decent outcomes for kids; and empowering parents with vouchers, ideally, and abundant charters as a second-best, is better than nothing.
  
  That Diane cannot see this – and that such brilliant minds as Rita Kramer, an Amazon reviewer of this sad wreck of a book, would be swayed by Ravitch’s blindness – is a wonder, given the wisdom she has demonstrated over the years.
  
  Any parent would understand that the educational institutions Ravitch desiderates for their children has not been available to schoolchildren for decades; while the best realistic alternatives available to them – charters and vouchers – she scorns for no reason, except that union-funded evaluations evaluate them badly. To us parents she offers nostalgia and dusty memories of past glories – and it tastes of ashes.

  Rating: 1 / 5
• By J. Reilly on Jul 27, 2010

  Diane Ravitch should have stopped at “The Death of”, because all she does is describe schooling from a couple of decades ago, how great it was, and how we just need to get back to that. At that point, the book completely departs from reality and into some kind of vague, polyanna-ish solution, if there is in fact any solution at all in the book.

  It’s dangerous when great thinkers like Ravitch give up on improving the system, and make no mistake; that is exactly what she has done and well documented here. We are at the beginning of a long road on education reform, and we are on the right track with accountability and some measure of competition. Ravitch’s assertion that these policies have failed is without merit and without supporting data.

  Rating: 1 / 5
• By M. Grant on Jul 27, 2010

  I noticed on Amazon’s site that this book is not available till March 2. I say I am suspicious because if these folks got an advance copy, they may be compatriots in this school of thought for public education.

  I happened upon the book last night in a book store at the mall and read most of the first chapter. It was good to see how Ms. Ravitch admits to her changing of positions over time toward aspects of public education. I get the impression from what I read in the first chapter and what I read on the jackets of the book she wants to return to the “old” days of public education. I say that in the time frame of before public education got so political. While I do not like how it has gotten political, the reason it got there was the realization that kids were graduating high school and could not function in the business world.

  I look forward to getting the book soon and walking through Ms. Ravitch’s experience and compare hers to my 25 years in a single system that has changed from a large city county system to a mostly urban system.
  Rating: 3 / 5
• By Robert V. Rose on Jul 27, 2010

  I would give this book only one star,and withhold the other four. She does an excellent job (and gets a very big one star) for describing the DEATH of the American school system. It is ridiculous to think that “testing” will help education, when schools can “game” the system. Prior to NCLB here in Georgia, the Georgia Public Policy Foundation published an annual report card on over 1,000 elementary schools in the state. Using Freedom of Information privileges, they published the average fourth-grade national percentile rankings, and the percentage of subsidized student lunches, for each school. There was a predictable nearly perfect inverse relationship between SES and academic performance…. But now our schools are rated on which percentage of kids pass the state reading test. One needs to be above the 33rd npr to pass the test. About 38% of our fourth-graders are functionally illiterate. So if a hypothetical ES in Georgia had every fourth-grader score in the 35th percentile, the school would be rated “the most academically successful school in the state”, even though not a single child could read at grade level.
  
  She is also right that education reform should come from the bottom up, not from education professors, NGO’s, politicians or writers. It should come from teachers, students and parents.
  
  I have no background in education (though an opinion piece of mine was published in the Oct., 2008 issue of the education journal, Phi Delta Kappan, and during my 33 years as a primary physician I’ve heard hundreds of teachers complain about parents, hundreds of parents complain about the schools, and hundreds of high-schoolers complain that school is worthless except for meeting friends and perhaps for team sports.)
  
  Ravitch’s great failure is her insistence that “there is no silver bullet; no magic feather”. Actually, there is a silver bullet — it’s called “The Three R’s”. Children who learn to Read at at least 120 wpm with good comprehension will have no problem with the humanities thereafter. In 1912, Maria Montessori wrote that young children who learn to write the alphabet “expertly”, learn to read spontaneously. (For documentation of my on-line study proving her correct, email Bob at [...] An obscure journal some years ago demonstrated that if second-graders can give more than 40 correct answers per minute to simple addition facts, they almost never have trouble with math or science thereafter.
  
  In her final chapter, Ravitch writes of the need for better parenting and more money for the schools. Hirsch has written that in the relatively few decades after Napoleon in France, the schools converted a nation of illiterate peasants into one of the educationally most sophisticated countries in the world.
  
  In the 1990′s Kozol, observing the plight of poor minorities in the South Bronx, recommended giving $60,000 per year to each poor familiy. But now we are in the middle of a great financial crisis. Everyone is going to have to learn to do with a bit less money — educators, unionists, politicians, financiers, etc. If each child were given a voucher for an amount worth say, 80% of what the average district spends educating each child, the voucher could be given back to the public school, a private school, a charter school, or cashed in to help defray the cost of home schooling. If “testing” isn’t the answer, then the “monitoring” forbidden by our horrible system of “progressive education”, and its awful concept of “developmentally inappropriate” curricula would certainly help usher in the kinds of liberal curricula favored by Ravitch, Rita Kramer, and E.D. Hirsch, Jr.. Unfortunately, Ravitch seems too committed to the unions and the present system to realize that. For my address, Google Robert V. Rose, M.D.
  Rating: 1 / 5
• By D. Woods on Jul 27, 2010

  I cannot understand Ravitch back tracking on her support for national standardized testing. She should be 100% unambiguous about the need for development of a national testing program. We have 50 states that run their own educational programs. If we are ever going to determine which programs work, we need some type of standardized testing to compare the results. I understand the difficulties in developing the tests, but every developed country has tests. Without tests you have no idea if the students are learning anything. When we hear about how badly our students are doing compared to other countries, it is because our students took a standardized test and someone compared the results to students from other countries. When we find that students in Finland read at two times the level ours do, our educators flock to Finland to see what they are doing. But somehow these same educators don’t see how a standardized test comparing Florida to Georgia might be helpful. Educators constantly refer to international comparisons and lament the sad state of our schools, yet oppose standardized tests to compare our diffferent state programs. The value of a national test is so obvious I am bewildered when I hear people opposing such an endeavor. This book adds nothing to the debate on national testing except confusion. It is insanity that this debate continues.
  Rating: 1 / 5

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