The Diane Ravitch interview: Director's Cut
Posted by Chris Potter on Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 9:07 AM
This is the extended version of our print-edition interview with education advocate and historian Diane Ravitch.
As your book notes, a few decades ago, many proposed education changes -- like charter schools and vouchers -- barely resonated outside a few right-wing think tanks. Today, they are conventional wisdom in both parties. How did that happen?
I think it's about campaign contributions. The driving force behind a lot of this movement is money. Wall Street got very intrigued with charter schools: It got to be the thing to do, to say, "I'm on the board of the Harlem Children's Zone." It was a status thing: You could say "I'm saving poor kids," and then go off to your weekend home in the Hamptons.
[And] we're at a time when income inequality is the worst it has been in 100 years. We're basically back in the robber-baron age. So instead of talking about why we have a tax structure where some people can accumulate billions while others barely survive, we're talking about charter schools. This is the great distraction.
How would you compare Pennsylvania's situation to that of other states?
Pennsylvania has more cyber charters than any other state. And if you were to ask me, what's the biggest scam in education today, I would say it's cyber charter schools. There's probably some small number of kids who need them ... but these schools have become raiders. They raid the public-school budget and provide a bad education, and have high drop-out rates.
The CEO of K-12 [the country's largest cyber-charter program] is from Goldman Sachs and McKinsey [a prominent corporate consultant] -- he doesn't have a background in education. His compensation in 2011 was $5 million, and it was tied not to academic performance but enrollment.
Last year, I met a guy who was one of the original administrators of K12. At a certain point, he realized that the whole company had been overtaken by a corporate mentality that said to recruiters "you'll get a bonus for the number of kids you recruit." So they no longer talked about education, they talked about recruitment.
In the 2010 book I was saying "I can't go to my grave without clearing my conscience of saying "all the things I used to support don't work. … I can't die with people thinking, 'She believed in all these terrible ideas.' I've got to clear myself and do the Paul Revere thing."
One big surprise in your book is that over the years, when kids have been tested on the same standardized questions, scores are actually improving, not getting worse.
I have to say it was a surprise to me too. In my book three years ago, I didn't say, "Guess what, the scores are up." I was just going along with the conventional wisdom. There's a very finely honed narrative: The schools are failing, failing, failing. But if you rank test scores by poverty and income, our low-poverty kids get incredible scores -- higher than Finland and Japan and Korea ... I began looking at long-trend test scores and the picture is up, up, up. There has been dramatic improvement, especially for black and Hispanic kids. Graduation rates are the highest they've ever been. [But saying that] would fly in the face of this narrative.
But there are schools that are failing, right?
You don't need standardized tests to tell you which schools they are. They're the ones with high concentrations of poverty and segregation. That's what the tests tell us every year, and then we say the way to fix the schools is to close them. That doesn't fix them; it just scatters the kids, and whatever problems they had. ... It's not that schools are failing. It's that America is failing to address poverty.