Diane Ravitch, a pioneer of school choice, comes out against the current direction of school reform.
The current emphasis on accountability has created a punitive atmosphere in the schools. The Obama administration seems to think that schools will improve if we fire teachers and close schools. They do not recognize that schools are often the anchor of their communities, representing values, traditions and ideals that have persevered across decades. They also fail to recognize that the best predictor of low academic performance is poverty—not bad teachers.
We don’t necessarily agree with her blanket statement about the punitive atmosphere because the extenuating circumstances in many instances warrant a thorough house-cleaning. We wish she’d talked more about school vouchers and what direction she would like reform to take. But there’s no denying what we emphasized above, which unfortunately dovetails into her view that schools represent the values of their communities.
We have said pretty much the same thing for years, though we boil it down further to negligent parenting and apply that label to adults on every economic level. The fact is you could have all the best teachers from your district in the school with the worst parents/most poverty and it wouldn’t make much of a difference. By and large, kids who come to school unprepared to learn and who are raised in homes where education isn’t valued aren’t going to live up to their potential, let alone achieve academically. Sadly, government spends huge sums every year subsidizing and rewarding the very anti-social behavior that has public schools on their downward trajectory.
Another significant barrier to real reform is the silver-bullet solution, which doesn’t exist. We sided with the teachers unions at the dawn of No Child Left Behind because one-size-fits-all government solutions aren’t the answer. But educational fads have come and gone since at least the 1960s and only have degraded public schools. And many of the problems with public schools can be laid at the feet of the unions, for their greed, arcane work rules, political correctness, degradation of curriculums, etc. There are more unindicted co-conspirators out there, but this is a blog, not a book.
It has taken public schools at least 50 years to degrade; they won’t be fixed overnight, and they certainly won’t be fixed by do-something politicians with their grandiose plans that serve only to enrich the special interests. In fact, public schools would do better with fewer laws, fewer regulations, fewer restrictions and less paperwork.
Speaking generally, Ms. Ravitch has a point when she objects to the current top-down emphasis because true education reform begins at home and in hometowns, with energized parents and citizens free to mold their public schools to represent their values, traditions and ideals.