Reject case for status quo in schools
Diane Ravitch, a former Education Department official in both the Bush and Clinton administrations, spoke this week in Lafayette. Interestingly enough, she spoke to a meeting of the Louisiana School Boards Association.
It's interesting because Ravitch speaks with the zeal of a convert on education issues. Once she embraced the structural changes on which much of the left and right agree as ways to improve a foundering public school system. But now she's found. She's found that charter schools and vouchers are bad business, that we shouldn't put so much time into standardized tests, and that we need to put more money classrooms.
Ravitch's experience and knowledge in the field of education are to be respected. With respect, we'd suggest that her remedy is no remedy at all, and that it amounts to no more than an endorsement of a status quo that parents, employers, taxpayers and public policy