Teachers, Superman and the ‘anti-Michelle Rhee’
Education historian Diane Ravitch says education reformers are killing the American school system
By Cosmo Garvin
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Bill Gates too is spreading the gospel of more testing and technology in the classroom. Even President Barack Obama is getting in on the school-reform act. He followed No Child Left Behind reforms with his own Race to the Top initiative, raising the stakes even higher for schools who lag on test scores.
The testing-and-accountability craze has swept the nation—but here and there are pockets of resistance, led by education historian Diane Ravitch. She was assistant secretary of education under Bush I, and was once a believer in testing and charter schools. She now also believes that Rhee and Gates and the other would-be reformers are actually hurting education, as she lays out in her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Ravitch is coming to Sacramento speak about the state of public education on Friday, January 20, at the Sacramento Convention Center. For more information, go to www.sacteachers.org
You once believed in choice and testing and “market-based” school reforms. How has your thinking changed?
I’ve always been a critic of public schools and still am. I think they can be much better. When I went to work in the first Bush administration—that was in 1991 and ’92—I was supportive in general of the idea that testing was a good thing, that
