Speaking of straw men, Jonathan Alter, you have just provided a textbook case in media manipulation:
#1) Begin with a sports analogy, Arne's go-to technique when the data isn't really on his side.
#2) Choose a person, rather than policies or solutions, as your target, because it doesn't require as much intellectual horsepower in analysis. For good measure, compare her to a Communist, "in denial."
#3) Trot out resonant cliches--"favor the status quo," "phenomenal results," "hardworking teachers," "sophisticated evaluations, "take down...an inner-city school"--and, my personal favorite, "working with unions." As if.
#4) Use lots of little deceptive captions, like "Classroom Malpractice" and "Misuse of Statistics" so that your average column skimmer will come away with an impression, rather than a more complex analysis of what's really going on in this your-research vs. my-research policy skirmish.
#5) Frost it all with incendiary language: "slimed," "pernicious," "malpractice."
Educators across the board respect Diane Ravitch's scholarship and conclusions. She made your buddy Arne look bad by uncovering the real data on his miracle schools. Assassinating her character makes you look bad in turn. For shame.
What's wrong "with business executives or other interested outsiders devoting time and money to public schools?" Because they expect to yield unearned authority in a field that they are wholly unqualified to act in, based on their economic investment.
Alleviating economic inequities i.e., poverty - IS a topic business interests are more qualified to address, and realistically equipped to change but I've yet to see them devote their time and money to that.
I disagree, educators with an agenda may respect her conclusions, but outsiders can easily see that isolated statistics and conclusions do not apply to across the board to school reform in every state.
The data is unique in every school, district, and state. One analysis does not draw a conclusion for an entire reform movement.
Mr. Alter, Is there really a need to attack Diane Ravitch? Seriously, what it is ityou fear? Clearly a straightforward testing/standards agenda is not getting the job done. Racing and competing (RTTT) do not work with kids and educators - businesses, maybe. Do you really think poverty is of no consequence - and that inequities between schools don't exist? Think about how learning happens in the first place - is it a results of practicing for tests or is is a result of connecting with meaningful content in a meaning context? Do we learn what we are told to learn, or do we learn what we want to learn? The word accountability is what has become distorted in these discussions - one would think that merely by threatening teachers and making the lives of students dedicated to test practice that all would be well. If you have ever worked with students you would know that this is not how learning happens, not how teachers excel. Let me say that I have seen project based learning (as one example of experiential learning) reach many many kids of all levels of socioeconomic background. PBL kids for the most part do fine on standardized tests, but their true abilities shine in the competencies they exhibit (sometimes called 21st century skills) - technology skills, creativity, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, and global awareness. We want competent students,not just those who can spew facts back for tests. Listen a little more carefully to what Diane Ravitch is saying - teachers across America are listening to her.
Wow! I consider myself a "fellow traveler" with Dr. Ravitch, but I did not realize that our central thesis was that teachers could do no better. I think we can do much better, but the path our "education reformers" have chosen is not the way.
I have worked in the high-poverty schools in Oakland, California, for the past 24 years, 18 of them as a classroom teacher. I have a firsthand understanding of what works, and what does not. Making a fetish out of test scores, and spending endless hours poring over test score data, does not work. It just makes teachers focus narrowly on test scores at the expense of real learning. Labeling schools as failures and firing key staff does not work, it just creates an atmosphere of fear -- but that seems to be one of the key weapons in the "reform" arsenal.
Alter asserts that reformers do not deny the reality of poverty. On the contrary, they do. Otherwise, how would we have a system that demands 100% of our students reach proficiency in a few short years? How would we have a system that requires Special Ed and English Language Learners be given the same tests and meet the same expectations as students without these disadvantages?
I wish Jonathan Alter would take a job for a single semester at an urban middle school. Take on the accountability for students that you write about so glibly. Then come back and tell us how you wish to be held accountable.
We WILL do better when we let go of the illusion that mandates and tests will improve our schools. That we can simultaneously improve an institution while systematically denigrating and disempowering the professionals who work there. We will do better when we recognize the importance of stabilizing a teaching staff, and giving them time and space, and respect for the critical collaborative work they need to do to improve. We will do better when we fund our schools properly, so they do not have to choose between a library and a nurse. Or worse yet, where they have neither. We will do better when education policy makers take the time to listen to people who work in our schools, and not 'reformers' funded by billionaires.
"Making a fetish out of test scores, and spending endless hours poring over test score data, does not work."
True.
"Otherwise, how would we have a system that demands 100% of our students reach proficiency in a few short years? How would we have a system that requires Special Ed and English Language Learners be given the same tests and meet the same expectations as students without these disadvantages? "
This is the result of professional negligence on the part of teachers. Who empowered politicians to create these policies for decades if not teachers? The silent acquiescence by teachers and their unions to these perniocious ideas are responsible for their eventual legislation. When salaries, benefits, and self-serving issues eclipse professional practice concerns as they have for decades then teachers are reaping what they have passively allowed to take root.
"We will do better when education policy makers take the time to listen to people who work in our schools, and not 'reformers' funded by billionaires."
Who cares who funds reform? Billionaires aren't evil. People "who work in our schools" need to articulate how to improve schools with something more than union sloganeering and the perpetuation of the status quo.
Start a list of concrete, actionable ideas *about public schools* that Ravitch and other public school apologists have offered. You won't need much more than a sticky note. They are hard to come by. Mostly its a finger pointing exercise that taxpayers can no longer afford.
There is so much money behind the push to privatize public education that I find it nearly impossible to take the opinion of reportedly unbiased intellectuals such as Alter who support the corporate education reform movement. The ed reform movement, is by the way, the status quo. To argue otherwise is simply delusional.
Your opinions are everything that working people have fought against for years. Easy access to free, high quality, public education that is controlled by the community is what we want. Charter schools, high stakes testing and the continued cuts in education budgets (which has been going on for years) are the attacks on our standards of living.
Did you go to a public school? How many low income students have you taught? How many of your students live in multi-family households? When you begin to confront these problems, you see how high stakes testing as a measure of students or teachers is misleading and flawed.
A challenge: put a percentage on these "minority of bad teachers." I'm sick and tired of people like you putting it out there, making people think that one bad teacher in a school of 50 (that's 2%) is ruining education for everyone. This is a flat out attack on teachers' unions. Please be honest. Also if teachers are exasperated, or give up it's due to lack of funding (teachers needing to buy supplies out of their own pockets), enormous class sizes (you try to give 120 students personal attention everyday over the course of 6 hours), and lack of support (explain again why all this money is being spent on "measuring" students and teachers and not reducing teacher-student ratios).
We need community control of our schools. Parents, teachers and students should be united in opposing people like you, politicians and corporate "reformers" who seek to tell us "what is best for our children." Teachers' unions need to wake up and reach out to parents, work together to fight against budget cuts and privatization (yes, charter schools ARE privatization).
This is perhaps the most mendacious essay I've ever seen. The outright dismissal of Dr. Ravitch's use of the very same statistics that privatizers use to tout their lucrative education schemes is humorous. The fact that she can derive the correct conclusion from them is what scares those bent on profiting from education. "[C]harter schools are in fact public schools?" Is it their unelected boards that make them public? Is it their negligible accountability to the community what makes them public? Is their nearly complete financial opaqueness (like a Form 990 really tells us anything) that makes them public? Is it their ability to avoid teaching children with special need or disciplinary issues what makes them public? Oh, yes, Mr. Alter et al will remind us that since they take public funds, that that must make them public. How quaintly Randian. Blackwater/Xe takes public funds, are we to understand that they are a public institution as well?
Indeed the most absurd part of this unmerited attack on Dr. Ravitch is the quote from Arne Duncan, who is a pariah amongst not only teachers, but most community activists. Duncan's disdain for public school teachers is legendary, his talk of "insulting all of the hardworking teachers" rings both duplicitous and insincere. His very occupying of his post is the ultimate insult to anyone that supports public education.
And Duncan's own programs/schools in Chicago are now closing and/or about to be closed. And this corporate right article by corporate right Jonathan Alter demonstrates just how desperate the corporate right, including Duncan, are to denigrate the truth, which Ravitch has made quite accessible and understandable...OBVIOUSLY Duncan and the Graham Family have launched their attack dogs on the truth, which is par for their corporate right course.
This article is just too, too funny! Seriously. It looks like the corporate ed deformers are feeling the heat. "...many reformers, including the heads of many charter schools, have education experience". Duncan? Gates? Broad? Oh my, that is just too too funny.
As a professor of software engineering, I am a consumer of the products of the school system. That is, my students are the output of the K-12 system. When the K-12 system does a poor job, it makes my job harder.
A few years ago, several colleagues and I noticed a striking difference in our students that term. (That difference has persisted since then). The students were better at simple tasks (e.g. multiple-choice questions). They were probably better at memorization. But they found more complex tasks very difficult. They needed more detailed directions. They found it very difficult to start from an intentionally incomplete sketch of a task and shape it to something that included their creativity. They had a remarkable abandon rate for these types of tasks. One of my courses has 5 challenging assignments that cue students to create real-life work products that they can show to prospective employers. For years, most of my students completed all five assignments. That term and after, every student abandoned at least one assignment and several abandoned two or three. When I talked with them, they didn't know how to start. They found it difficult and frustrating to structure and direct their own work. Several told me they expected me to break the tasks into bite-size chunks for them and that not doing this was unfair. We have always had students with these challenges, but now, "A" students were showing the cognitive weaknesses I had come to expect of "C" students.
I believe the "striking difference" is a byproduct of the "Reform" that Jonathan Alter presents as a success. I believe that in that fall term, we finally had a generation of students who had gone through the "reformed" curriculum all the way to Grade 12. This was the result of the "improved" educational system.
I've had to rework my course designs and shift my expectations because I have a generation of smart, motivated students who are so less well prepared.
A school system can appear to do better by focusing on teaching its students to perform better on standardized tests, but this is not education, or not good education. Life is not a set of standardized tests. Professional work involves creativity, complexity, and self-directed work. As far as I can tell, the "reformed" K-12 system is doing a worse job of preparing students for professional work, and for the responsibilities of citizenship.
I know very few educators who think the "reforms" have improved the system. To the best of my knowledge, no colleague of mine who I respect as an educator thinks the "reforms" have improved the cognitive skills of our students.
I know several former K-12 teachers who left the system because they believed they were being asked to do very bad work that would be harmful to their students.
It dismays me that the legitimate concerns of so many educators are so often dismissed, so often with attacks on their professionalism.
The USA has wasted far too much money getting computers and internet connections into our public schools. Computers being huge money pits and the internet little more than another distraction in the classroom. The combination fostering lazy behavior from both teachers and students, diminishing the student's ability to self learn having to be injected with stimulus.
The introduction of computers driving up the cost of school construction, leading to security issues and cost to protect the capital expenditures. Also, large sums of money wasted on computer admin services and software updates, generating non valued added expenses. A solution to some of the money problems being, returning to books, for the “basic” subject matters do not change, hence why these subjects are referred to as basic. The current and popular focus on teaching non basic subject matters being a reflection of our educator's not having core competence.
Most all of the people crying for more money to be spent on schools, such as Mr. Obama and Labor Sec. Mrs. Solis having been non participants of the analytical fields. In short, people least qualified to correct the problem, or state balanced opinions regarding possible solution sets.
Also, we need to fire or remove many of the teachers in the classrooms today. Most which I have met not qualified to be tasked with, or given the responsibility of educating our country's single greatest asset, our children. Worst, many of the parents in our country, inept at child rearing, undisciplined, little more than immature spoiled, untested adults, are mentally undeveloped.
Their offsprings void of motivation, generally obese, more immature then their parents. Raised not to be self-reliant, self absorbed, unproductive masters of social networks and video games. Most American adolescents not even making the grade of useful idiot. The majority of the older adults in this country inept and squandering, much like the incompetent people on TV, greatly in need of Creaser the dog trainer.
Also, the more our society capitulates to affirmative action, equal opportunity, the delusion of a unisex culture, and no personal discipline and responsibility, the more this country will nurture the lowest common denominator. Destroying the inner fiber responsible for this nation's greatness.
Most all of the people I associate with, outside of the "academic world" with deep knowledge of the technical fields NOT in agreement with the typical unsubstantiated bark emanating from the many pillars of incompetence, a.k.a. teachers unions, government officials, and or members of state and local governments. Most all of which wanting to continue with the promoting of bad behavior instead of accepting personal responsibility for having failed. Lacking strength in character to step down and acknowledge such failures.
