Reforming Reform

Diane Ravitch’s book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education is a book that coerces introspection on the part of both the author and the reader.  While Ravitch goes into to detail about her positions on education and how her beliefs have slowly evolved, one can’t help but reflect on his or her own experiences in public education.  After all, the book asks us to think about what kind of people we want students to become, even if it is more about the way in which we get there.  And in asking that, the readers must look at whether they can consider themselves and those around them successes, and how much of that can be attributed to public schooling itself.

In Death and Life, Ravitch reveals the dozens of agendas that are impeding and ruining modern education today for teachers and students alike.  She brings up the millions of dollars being fought for by testing companies and charter organizations.  Readers are also exposed to billionaire philanthropists looking to influence education policy and incidentally weakening social relations within communities by breaking up schools.  We are shown politicians that can’t even come to a consensus about questions on a national history exam because they project their own political attitudes and biases onto them.  Even teachers and administrators are shown to be affected by taking part in grade inflation and outright cheating to secure their own jobs.  Throughout the book, Ravitch creates a picture of schools that are failing because people are caught up in their own motivations—oversimplifying, and in some cases outright ignoring what is best for students.

Ravitch’s book points blame at a lot of sources for abusing their power in the name money, power, and pride, but indirectly it casts blame on American society as a whole.  Perhaps the real failure of schools is not that we are lower in test scores than other countries, but that our society is so apathetic and uninformed to the lies and inequities present today.  The fact is that the people who ignore the hard data that shows that test scores have no correlation with complex critical thinking and reasoning; the ones that are always looking for a quick fix—all of these people are products of the American school system.  I was distraught in class to hear that the critics of the book feel it is wanting for not offering a concrete solution to this current crisis because it is a sign of this same attitude.  It feels like people want to be able to just Google the answers to all their questions and problems instead of taking them apart and logically to examining them to discover that solution.  There is a motivation problem in this country, and as Ravitch points out, an infrastructure based on do-or-die testing with extreme consequences is not the way to get people more re-engaged with learning and thinking.

Most disturbing of all is the plan the author presents to systematically break down the institution of public schooling by closing schools, undermining educational professionals, and channeling money away from districts through harsh sanctions that do nothing to improve the education system whatsoever.  Right now education reform is creating solutions that are only successful if one looks at appearances at the surface at the surface level.  Test scores and graduation rates may go up in some charter schools, but that’s only because many exclude poorer students through lotteries and suspensions.  Scripted literacy programs may create better understanding about how to read, but they’re doing nothing to inspire students to utilize reading for any means other than passing school. 

Death and Life isn’t the book to solve the problems of school reform, but it is a book to start readers and educators on the reflection process.  In highlighting the blows struck to public schools in the last decade, Ravitch’s book asks us not just to feel pity for those affected the most, but to realize that education policy is an ever-changing entity.  The solution to it will lie in examination, collaboration, and compromise.  The events touched upon in this book show that schools, and perhaps other institutions within society, need to produce citizens more willing to analyze, and more importantly participate.  As an initial supporter of school reform Ravitch admits that, like with most innovations, she focused on the potential benefits of these policies without thinking about the consequences.  Whether these consequences could be foreseen is difficult to say.  However, all education is rooted in the idea that to learn, students first need to try new things.  Then, when they mess up they have to reflect on why and try again.  That’s where learning occurs.  If schools are ever to improve, we have to use the same process as educators; otherwise we come off as hypocrites to every student we’ve told to keep trying and not give up.  By making these mistakes clearer and articulating their effects so precisely, Diane Ravitch has taken the first step in helping to come up with the solution.  She emphasizes in the book that there is no such thing as a quick fix or silver bullet, so that in turn means that schools can be saved, but it will be quite a struggle that we need to prepare for.