(Originally Published 2010, Updated Paperback Edition 288 pages)
There's so much great stuff between the pages of Ms. Ravitch's book, there's no way this short review will do it justice. Look, most everybody wants their kids or the nation's schools to do a better job, but 20th-century history repeatedly shows it's easier said than done. Expecting some unified national standards for education or being able to gauge progress by highly error-prone test assessments is as realistic as believing the government can pass a law decreeing that it will always rain M&Ms. American education has nearly always been perceived in crisis THROUGHOUT the 20th century. Ms. Ravitch clearly and correctly shows that the current attempts to transform students into commodities, products and consumers as well as turning schooling into a marketplace is unrealistic and has done and will continue to do immense social harm with crappy results.
As a parent of two sons, who are now teenagers and in the public school system in a small Maine community of approximately 16,000, we've seen the dedication of teachers and administrators in helping our sons prepare for adulthood. Naturally, there were a few rotten apples in the bunch, but they are the exception not the rule. Show me a large bureaucracy that doesn't have it fair share of excellent, average, and poor employees and I'll show you a person lying out his backside. Speaking as a 53-year-old man, I've also seen and read oodles of examples in the "hallowed" business environments where they carry a portion of deadwood employees no matter how hard they try to eliminate them. Believing businesspeople or legislators know the right approach to improving education through market means is the kind of stuff that should relegate the advocate into a corner and forced to wear a dunce cap. Our own current rockhead governor has been on a free-market crusade painting unions and administrators as self-serving individuals who don't care about the kids and are in the way of "reform." The governor and his well-intentioned ilk are looking at schooling in a profoundly anti-intellectual definition of education. The No-Child-Left-Behind's (NCLB) technocratic approach based on only two subjects, reading and math, and impossible goal of every student being proficient in these two areas by 2014 is doing much harm and ZERO improvement in education scores.
Ms. Ravitch impartial assessment of a wide variety of school systems who implement voucher programs, charter schools, smaller schools, centralized control, decentralized control, privately-managed schools etc., clearly shows many of them cause a lot of chaos and no discernible or worse results. Heck, it shouldn't even be a surprise that many of the large urban schools with huge improvements in their test results were illegally cooking the books because of loony NCLB goals. The author explains the major fallibility of test assessments, different ways to game the scoring system, political puffery that are outright lies, narrowing curriculum for focus on testing, NAEP audits, value-added assessments, poverty, racism, venture philanthropists, the largesse of private foundations, the necessity of unions in academia, the movie 'Waiting for Superman,' and the good ole days of education that never existed.
As Ms. Ravitch convincingly explains, treating teachers as mere workers to order around instead of the professionals they are is just plain dumb. Trust, not coersion is a necessary precondition for school reform. The epilogue to the paperback edition adds frosting to the cake of her well-researched and well-written argument. For God's sake, read the thing. It's fantastic.
As a parent of two sons, who are now teenagers and in the public school system in a small Maine community of approximately 16,000, we've seen the dedication of teachers and administrators in helping our sons prepare for adulthood. Naturally, there were a few rotten apples in the bunch, but they are the exception not the rule. Show me a large bureaucracy that doesn't have it fair share of excellent, average, and poor employees and I'll show you a person lying out his backside. Speaking as a 53-year-old man, I've also seen and read oodles of examples in the "hallowed" business environments where they carry a portion of deadwood employees no matter how hard they try to eliminate them. Believing businesspeople or legislators know the right approach to improving education through market means is the kind of stuff that should relegate the advocate into a corner and forced to wear a dunce cap. Our own current rockhead governor has been on a free-market crusade painting unions and administrators as self-serving individuals who don't care about the kids and are in the way of "reform." The governor and his well-intentioned ilk are looking at schooling in a profoundly anti-intellectual definition of education. The No-Child-Left-Behind's (NCLB) technocratic approach based on only two subjects, reading and math, and impossible goal of every student being proficient in these two areas by 2014 is doing much harm and ZERO improvement in education scores.
Ms. Ravitch impartial assessment of a wide variety of school systems who implement voucher programs, charter schools, smaller schools, centralized control, decentralized control, privately-managed schools etc., clearly shows many of them cause a lot of chaos and no discernible or worse results. Heck, it shouldn't even be a surprise that many of the large urban schools with huge improvements in their test results were illegally cooking the books because of loony NCLB goals. The author explains the major fallibility of test assessments, different ways to game the scoring system, political puffery that are outright lies, narrowing curriculum for focus on testing, NAEP audits, value-added assessments, poverty, racism, venture philanthropists, the largesse of private foundations, the necessity of unions in academia, the movie 'Waiting for Superman,' and the good ole days of education that never existed.
As Ms. Ravitch convincingly explains, treating teachers as mere workers to order around instead of the professionals they are is just plain dumb. Trust, not coersion is a necessary precondition for school reform. The epilogue to the paperback edition adds frosting to the cake of her well-researched and well-written argument. For God's sake, read the thing. It's fantastic.
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