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From: Kevin Carey
To: Diane Ravitch, Ben Wildavsky, Richard Rothstein, and Andrew Rotherham
Subject: School improvement has to happen now, not at some magic moment when the conditions are just right. Also, surely we can find common ground on charter schools.
Richard, I sometimes wonder why you bother to write about public schools. You seem to have very little interest in the practice of education itself. You’re forever asserting that schools are, at best, incidental.
Of course hunger, mobility, stress, and poor health are barriers to learning.
But let me put it this way: Say we have a group of low-income minority students with chronic health problems whose parents are unemployed. They can attend one of two schools. The first has crumbling facilities, no coherent curriculum, indifferent leadership, and a poorly trained staff of unmotivated teachers who can never be fired. We suspect that academic results in this school are very bad, but we don’t know for sure because the only available data comes from the school itself, which reports that students are doing “fine, all things considered."
The second school has new facilities, a rich curriculum, and a strong principal. Teachers are well-trained and work in a cooperative, mutually supportive environment. Excellent teaching is rewarded, and there is no tolerance for incompetence. Student results on national criterion-referenced tests are reported to the community every year.
Do you care which school those children attend? Or are you indifferent, because the differences between them are “likely to be overwhelmed by the impact of
