Listen: In Louisville, Education Instigator Diane Ravitch Shares Concerns About School Reforms
She's against high-stakes testing, big business in schools, and doubts charters are the answer to improving public education. But Diane Ravitch, a New York University research professor who has become an influence voice in U.S. education, didn't always feel this way.
“It’s very difficult once you become embedded in a point of view to step back from it," Ravitch said Wednesday. "And I found that to be true because all your social networks tend to agree with you."
Ravitch spoke at WFPL studios Wednesday morning to an audience that included people who agreed and disagreed with her beliefs on how to improve public education. Ravitch won the 2014 Grawemeyer Award for Education from the University of Louisville for her book, "The Life and Death of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education."
She explains how she worked on reforms for the U.S. Department of Education under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, but changed her mind on the policies she supported then.
She now says those policies now hurting students, teachers, and schools.
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Does she thinks our understanding of the way children learn has changed?
"I think what we understand is that there is no single understanding, that children are very different, and what we're trying to do today is to create standardization and it doesn't work," Ravitch told the audience in WFPL's studio.
"That children are so different and I hear this from teachers all the time and I know this from my own experience, that the sophistication about learning is to recognize that you have to be, as a teacher, flexible enough to respond to the children in front of you, which is why when you get non educators making policy, they don't understand that."
Ravtich also said the Common Core Standards, which Kentucky and a majority of states have adopted, will not answer public education's single biggest problem, the "vast inequality in our society."
"The standards will not change that. Where they could be helpful to teachers is, if Listen: In Louisville, Education Instigator Diane Ravitch Shares Concerns About School Reforms | WFPL: