Grading Diane Ravitch's education ideas
Frank Wilson
is a retired Inquirer book editor who blogs at http://booksinq.blogspot.com
Diane Ravitch was for No Child Left Behind (NCLB) before she was against it.
NCLB became law in January 2002, and Ravitch - a former assistant secretary of education - says her support for it "remained strong" for nearly five years, until Nov. 30, 2006. "I can pinpoint the exact date because that was the day I realized NCLB was a failure," she recounts in The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. The occasion was a conference at the American Enterprise Institute examining "whether the major remedies prescribed by NCLB - especially choice and after-school tutoring - were effective."
As it happened, "only a tiny fraction of eligible students asked to transfer to better schools" - 2 percent or less. Figures for after-school tutoring were not much better: 20 percent of eligible students in New Jersey took advantage of it, but in California only 7 percent; in Colorado, 10 percent; and in Kentucky, 9 percent.
There is nothing partisan in Ravitch's critique of NCLB. The law, she notes, was passed with broad bipartisan support. "In retrospect," she writes, "NCLB seems foreordained. . . . Elected officials of both parties came to accept as secular gospel the idea that testing and accountability would necessarily lead to better schools."
Ravitch's book is a must-read if you want to get some idea of just how chaotic educational thinking in this country has become.
"For the past century or more," she writes, "education reformers have tried out their ideas in the schools. . . . With
is a retired Inquirer book editor who blogs at http://booksinq.blogspot.com
NCLB became law in January 2002, and Ravitch - a former assistant secretary of education - says her support for it "remained strong" for nearly five years, until Nov. 30, 2006. "I can pinpoint the exact date because that was the day I realized NCLB was a failure," she recounts in The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. The occasion was a conference at the American Enterprise Institute examining "whether the major remedies prescribed by NCLB - especially choice and after-school tutoring - were effective."
As it happened, "only a tiny fraction of eligible students asked to transfer to better schools" - 2 percent or less. Figures for after-school tutoring were not much better: 20 percent of eligible students in New Jersey took advantage of it, but in California only 7 percent; in Colorado, 10 percent; and in Kentucky, 9 percent.
There is nothing partisan in Ravitch's critique of NCLB. The law, she notes, was passed with broad bipartisan support. "In retrospect," she writes, "NCLB seems foreordained. . . . Elected officials of both parties came to accept as secular gospel the idea that testing and accountability would necessarily lead to better schools."
Ravitch's book is a must-read if you want to get some idea of just how chaotic educational thinking in this country has become.
"For the past century or more," she writes, "education reformers have tried out their ideas in the schools. . . . With
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