Diane Ravitch Declares the Education Reform Movement Dead
SLAYING GOLIATH
The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Schools
By Diane Ravitch
The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Schools
By Diane Ravitch
She came. She saw. She conquered.
Such is the triumphant theme of “Slaying Goliath,” the latest work by the education historian turned education activist Diane Ravitch. The book exults in the failures of a reform movement that the author has spent the past decade denouncing — a movement that has often deserved her indignant critiques. In winning, however, Ravitch has also lost: Missing from these pages are the subtle insight and informed judgment for which she was once known.
Ravitch came to the education scene in the late 1960s, writing articles for education journals and then a series of well-respected books about the history of public schooling in America. In 1991, her career took the first of many turns: Ravitch was invited to join the administration of President George H. W. Bush as an assistant secretary of education. Though a lifelong Democrat, she took the job, and over the next several years she found her beliefs moving rightward. “In the decade following my stint in the federal government, I argued that certain managerial and structural changes — that is, choice, charters, merit pay and accountability — would help to reform our schools,” she later wrote. “Having been immersed in a world of true believers, I was influenced by their ideas.” Pushed forward by the advocacy of Ravitch and many others, these ideas (including the introduction of “charters,” independently operated public schools freed from many of the regulations imposed on traditional public schools) began to take root in the real world.
And then Ravitch’s thinking took another turn.
She saw, sooner than most, that the changes imposed by the federal laws known as No Child Left Behind (during the presidency of George W. Bush) and Race to the Top (under the administration of Barack Obama) were burdening students, who were being subjected to endless rounds of test-prep and test-taking, and demoralizing teachers, who were being evaluated and penalized in ways that were rigid and often unfair. In a book published in 2010, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” Ravitch described her transformation from enthusiastic champion to vocal critic of conservative efforts to remake education in the United States. Three years later she published “Reign of Error,” a book that condemned these efforts in even more forceful terms. CONTINUE READING: Diane Ravitch Declares the Education Reform Movement Dead - The New York Times