Schools Matter: Ravitch Revisionism

Schools Matter: Ravitch Revisionism:
Ravitch Revisionism

 It has taken just over a month since the passage of the god-awful rewrite of ESEA for Diane Ravitch to begin revising the history of her earlier enthusiastic support for the piece of dreck legislation that Gary Orfield and others have noted will turn back education policy in this country by more than a half century.  

In initiating her own limp revisionism, Ravitch has skewed a number of facts and left out out others, while failing to account for her quick pivot from unabashed ESSA fan to its harshest critic.  

A correction is required, then, and in order to do so in manner that does not misinterpret Diane's blog post, I will post her remarks in italics, which I will intersperse with bracketed clarifications.

It was difficult for Congress to agree on a replacement for the failed No Child Left Behind. NCLB was supposed to be reauthorized in 2007, but it took eight long years to finally reach a bipartisan agreement.

The good part about the Every Child Succeeds Act is that it spells the end of federal punishment for schools, principals, and teachers whose students have low test scores, and it restricts the ability of the U.S. Department of Education (ED) to dictate how schools should reform. There is no more AYP (adequate yearly progress); there is no more deadline of 2014 by which time every student everywhere will be proficient, which was always a hoax that no one believed in.

 [I'm afraid there is bad news in Diane's good news.  The federal punishments in ESSA continue, if we mean by punishment annual testing in all schools and  months of test prep that go with annual testing in high poverty schools.  For even though Adequate Yearly Progress has been officially removed, those schools with highest poverty and the lowest scores must engage in a test-based version of The Hunger Games, whereby every poor school battles to avoid ending up dead in the bottom 5 percent of schools.  

By federal mandate in ESSA, the schools in the bottom 5 percent must be turned around.  And with ESSA's massive charter incentives to states and the corporate foundations, charter conversion will be the turnaround of choice in most states. 

So even though the ludicrous 2014 target date for proficiency is now gone, every poor school in America has a target on its back with the new ESSA.   And with a new 5 percent of lowest performing schools emerging each year, the privatization will continue just as before under NCLB, except that there will be much less federal oversight.  Of course, none of this is news to Diane, even though she does not talk about any of it when she is offering the "good news" about ESSA].  There would be no "good news" if she did.]

The bad part about ESSA is that it preserves the mindset of NCLB, a mindset that says that standards, testing and accountability are the keys to student success. They are not. NCLB proved they are not. Since “A Nation at Risk” in 1983, policymakers have been in love with the idea that this combination will cause a Schools Matter: Ravitch Revisionism: