Taking Back School Reform: A Conversation Between Diane Ravitch and Mike Rose
This is such a great “conversation” that I decided to post it rather than just add a link in the right hand column.
Last month, education scholars Diane Ravitch and Mike Rose held a conversation at the University of California-Los Angeles about issues raised in Ravitch’s much-discussed new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Afterward, they continued their conversation by e-mail, focusing on key topics that emerged in their discussion at UCLA.
It goes as follows:
From: Mike Rose
To: Diane RavitchSubject: Public Education Under Attack
You and I are both concerned about the predominance of school-bashing rhetoric in the national discussion of public schools. This dismissive language runs across the ideological spectrum; we find it in the pages of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard or at a convening of left-leaning high-tech entrepreneurs interested in education. This way of talking about public schools, as we both argue, provides the ideological foundation to dismiss public education, to seek free-market solutions or structural or technological miracle cures. So well-to-do parents don’t send their kids to public schools. Wealthy donors direct their money elsewhere. And young people have second thoughts about a teaching career.
Of course there are problems in public schools. There’s wide variation in the teaching force. How could there not be with so many people, over 3 million? As with lawyers or journalists or plumbers, you’re going to find a range of competence. Same with schools. So political pressure to address incompetence and improve the status quo is a positive thing and essential in a democratic society. But that kind of targeted attempt at reform is not what concerns me and you. We’re talking about a reigning discourse of despair about teaching and the schools. It’s troubling—and dangerous. I’m thinking about an opening line from an article in The Weekly Standard: “We can all agree that public schools are a joke.” This is our new common sense, but it doesn’t even leave us with a problem to solve.
From: Diane Ravitch
To: Mike Rose
Subject: RE: Public Education Under Attack
One of the interesting aspects of the current situation is, in my view, that public education itself is under attack as never before. There have always been critics of the public schools, but the critics wanted to make public schools better. Now, many critics think that the answer to public education is to get rid of it, to replace it with something that is wholly different and not subject to any democratic participation or control. We see this with the demand for vouchers, which couches its claims as a fervent plea to help students escape from failing schools. The voucher supporters don’t think that any such schools can be fixed or improved; the only hope, they believe, is to help children get out. The arguments for charters are closely related, because the clamor for charters comes from a deep-seated wish to create escape routes from public education. One reason I am so discouraged by the present state of debate is that so little is said about improving public schools and so much about how to close schools, how to punish teachers. Before we can begin to have a serious discussion about public education, we must re-establish the belief that there are strong, powerful reasons to have public schools and that they are one of the foundational institutions in a democratic society.
From: Diane Ravitch
To: Mike Rose
Subject: Defining “Effective” Teachers
Mike, I want us to talk a bit more about teachers in the current “reform” environment. Reformers begin their discussion of teachers with a universally acclaimed proposition: Teachers are important, and every child should have a great teacher. No one disagrees. They then go on to define a great teacher as an
