Ed Reform 101 Extra Credit: Diane Ravitch
A few years ago, I attended a large conference of conservative foundations and chaired a panel in which contestants were invited to submit their proposal for the best education idea of the next decade. A man from a public relations firm said that his big idea was to put billboards all across the state of New Jersey blaming the teachers' unions for the woeful condition of public education. As a judge, I asked him if he could explain a few things that puzzled me. Why was Massachusetts the highest performing state in the nation, even though it had a unionized teaching force? And why was Finland the highest performing nation in the world, even though it has a unionized teaching force? And why were the right-to-work states and the states with weak unions usually found near the bottom of the federal testing reports? He demurred, saying he was a public relations person, not an educational expert.
At the time, I didn't look closely into the statistics for New Jersey, but New Jersey is certainly in the national spotlight since the governor wants to inject competition and other free-market principles into education.
So, I just reviewed the data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress - the federal program that is
