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Comments

1. 
   On July 18, 2010 Mark Rutherford says:

   Diane Ravitch wants to wave a wand and send American education back to what it was in the 1950s – pretty excellent. She refuses to see that the quality of teachers has declined; that Albert Shanker, sadly, is long dead, and has been replaced by union leaders without the slightest concern for anything but making teachers impossible to manage and to fire; and that, left to their own devices, education authorities go for whatever idiotic thoughts are currently fashionable, such as contructivist math. In this situation, accountability and testing, for all their weaknesses, are the only way to ensure decent outcomes for kids; and empowering parents with vouchers, ideally, and abundant charters as a second-best, is better than nothing.
   
   That Diane cannot see this – and that such brilliant minds as Rita Kramer, an Amazon reviewer of this sad wreck of a book, would be swayed by Ravitch’s blindness – is a wonder, given the wisdom she has demonstrated over the years.
   
   Any parent would know that the educational institutions Ravitch desiderates for their children has not been available to schoolchildren for decades; while the best realistic alternatives available to them – charters and vouchers – she scorns for no reason, except that union-funded evaluations evaluate them terribly. To us parents she offers nostalgia and dusty memories of past glories – and it tastes of ashes.

   Rating: 1 / 5

2. 
   On July 18, 2010 J. Reilly says:

   Diane Ravitch should have stopped at “The Death of”, because all she does is describe schooling from a couple of decades ago, how fantastic it was, and how we just need to get back to that. At that point, the book completely departs from reality and into some kind of vague, polyanna-ish solution, if there is in fact any solution at all in the book.

   It’s perilous when fantastic thinkers like Ravitch give up on improving the system, and make no mistake; that is exactly what she has done and well documented here. We are at the beginning of a long road on education reform, and we are on the right track with accountability and some measure of competition. Ravitch’s assertion that these policies have failed is without merit and without supporting data.

   Rating: 1 / 5

3. 
   On July 18, 2010 M. Grant says:

   I noticed on Amazon’s site that this book is not available till March 2. I say I am suspicious because if these folks got an advance copy, they may be compatriots in this school of thought for public education.

   I happened upon the book last night in a book store at the mall and read most of the first chapter. It was excellent to see how Ms. Ravitch admits to her changing of positions over time toward aspects of public education. I get the impression from what I read in the first chapter and what I read on the jackets of the book she wants to return to the “ancient” days of public education. I say that in the time frame of before public education got so political. While I do not like how it has gotten political, the reason it got there was the realization that kids were graduating high school and could not function in the business world.

   I look forward to getting the book soon and walking through Ms. Ravitch’s experience and compare hers to my 25 years in a single system that has changed from a large city county system to a mostly urban system.
   Rating: 3 / 5

4. 
   On July 18, 2010 Robert V. Rose says:

   I would give this book only one star,and withhold the other four. She does an brilliant job (and gets a very huge one star) for describing the DEATH of the American school system. It is ridiculous to reckon that “testing” will help education, when schools can “game” the system. Prior to NCLB here in Georgia, the Georgia Public Policy Foundation published an annual report card on over 1,000 elementary schools in the state. Using Freedom of Information privileges, they published the average fourth-grade national percentile rankings, and the percentage of subsidized student lunches, for each school. There was a predictable nearly perfect inverse relationship between SES and academic performance…. But now our schools are rated on which percentage of kids pass the state reading test. One needs to be above the 33rd npr to pass the test. About 38% of our fourth-graders are functionally illiterate. So if a hypothetical ES in Georgia had every fourth-grader score in the 35th percentile, the school would be rated “the most academically successful school in the state”, even though not a single child could read at grade level.
   
   She is also right that education reform should come from the bottom up, not from education professors, NGO’s, politicians or writers. It should come from teachers, students and parents.
   
   I have no background in education (though an opinion piece of mine was published in the Oct., 2008 issue of the education journal, Phi Delta Kappan, and during my 33 years as a primary physician I’ve heard hundreds of teachers complain about parents, hundreds of parents complain about the schools, and hundreds of high-schoolers complain that school is worthless except for meeting friends and perhaps for team sports.)
   
   Ravitch’s fantastic failure is her insistence that “there is no silver bullet; no magic feather”. Really, there is a silver bullet — it’s called “The Three R’s”. Children who learn to Read at at least 120 wpm with excellent comprehension will have no problem with the humanities thereafter. In 1912, Maria Montessori wrote that young children who learn to write the alphabet “expertly”, learn to read spontaneously. (For documentation of my on-line study proving her right, email Bob at [...] An obscure journal some years ago demonstrated that if second-graders can give more than 40 right answers per minute to simple addition facts, they nearly never have distress with math or science thereafter.
   
   In her final chapter, Ravitch writes of the need for better parenting and more money for the schools. Hirsch has written that in the relatively few decades after Napoleon in France, the schools converted a nation of illiterate peasants into one of the educationally most sophisticated countries in the world.
   
   In the 1990′s Kozol, observing the plight of poor minorities in the South Bronx, recommended giving $60,000 per year to each poor familiy. But now we are in the middle of a fantastic financial crisis. Everyone is going to have to learn to do with a bit less money — educators, unionists, politicians, financiers, etc. If each child were given a voucher for an amount worth say, 80% of what the average district spends educating each child, the voucher could be given back to the public school, a private school, a charter school, or cashed in to help defray the cost of home schooling. If “testing” isn’t the answer, then the “monitoring” forbidden by our horrible system of “progressive education”, and its dreadful concept of “developmentally inappropriate” curricula would certainly help usher in the kinds of liberal curricula favored by Ravitch, Rita Kramer, and E.D. Hirsch, Jr.. Unfortunately, Ravitch seems too committed to the unions and the present system to realize that. For my address, Google Robert V. Rose, M.D.
   Rating: 1 / 5

5. 
   On July 18, 2010 Fredric D. Williams says:

   As far as I can discern, Ms. Ravitch doesn’t have a long history in teaching or administration in the public schools. She went from editing a socialist magazine to writing books about education to getting a Ph.D. in education history. She spent eighteen months as a political appointee in the US Department of Education, and advocated the testing and choice now being sampled here and there around the US.

   But, her latest book merely reflects the views of someone looking down from a place in the sky (OK, at NYU anyway). She sees the reform she supported in the 1990s has been as huge a failure as most top-down directives from the Washington politburo.

   Education has a powerful position in our society, and because it is mandatory for all American children and funded by taxpayers, it is impervious to change — beneficial or detrimental. Nevertheless, policy makers and academics regularly broadcast the latest reform, a series of never-ending fads, as a way to diffuse criticism.

   She says, in the fine print above the title “Fantastic” American School System. It isn’t. We all know it. She is playing to her audience — in this case the teachers and right believers in government-managed everything.

   Government can’t manage. When it tries to manage using new techniques (testing and choice), it simply fails once again. Government can’t manage.

   And while her prescriptions may sound like the real solution at last, they are merely cliches repeated regularly for most of the past 150 years. As a historian of education she should know this:

   We need “focus on the essentials . . . a strong, coherent, explicit curriculum that is grounded in the liberal arts and sciences, with plenty of opportunity for children to engage in activities and projects that make learning lively. We must ensure that students gain the knowledge they need to know political debates, scientific phenomena, and the world they live in. We must make sure they are prepared for the responsibilities of democratic citizenship in a complex society. We must take care that our teachers are well educated, not just well trained. We must make sure that schools have the authority to maintain both standards of learning and standards of behavior.”

   We have none of these things, and no means to achieve them. Had she better understood the problem, she would have been less enthusiastic about testing and choice as solutions. She is just another academic living in a pretend world, clueless about the real problems and unable to provide real solutions.
   Rating: 2 / 5