The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
More Books: >> see complete list
Initially a supporter of the contemporary movement to reform/improve public education, Dr. Ravitch's experiences with actual instances of attempts to implement those strategies turned her into an opponent of them. The singleminded drive to have children pass testing to standards in reading and math while otherwise ignoring curriculum and what, if anything, is actually learned, was in fact undermining education, not advancing it.
I was also concerned that accountability, now a shibboleth that everyone applauds, had become mechanistic and even antithetical to good education.
...
What once was an effort to improve the quality of education turned into an accounting strategy: Measure, then punish or reward. No education experience was needed to administer such a program. Anyone who loved data could do it.
Ravitch is a highly respected historian of education was the assistant secretary of education under president George Bush The First, served on the national Assessment Governing Board under president Bill Clinton, has written several books and scholarly papers along with working with or for a number of think tanks, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University among them.
You can hear an interview with the author at NPR.
As an education historian and former assistant secretary of education, Ravitch has witnessed the trends in public education over the past 40 years and has herself swung from public-school advocate to market-driven accountability and choice supporter back to public-school advocate. With passion and insight, she analyzes research and draws on interviews with educators, philanthropists, and business executives to question the current direction of reform of public education. In the mid-1990s, the movement to boost educational standards failed on political concerns; next came the emphasis on accountability with its reliance on standardized testing. Now educators are worried that the No Child Left Behind mandate that all students meet proficiency standards by 2014 will result in the dismantling of public schools across the nation. Ravitch analyzes the impact of choice on public schools, attempts to quantify quality teaching, and describes the data wars with advocates for charter and traditional public schools. Ravitch also critiques the continued reliance on a corporate model for school reform and the continued failure of such efforts to emphasize curriculum. Conceding that there is no single solution, Ravitch concludes by advocating for strong educational values and revival of strong neighborhood public schools. For readers on all sides of the school-reform debate, this is a very important book. --Vanessa Bush
