Grading Diane Ravitch's education ideas

Frank Wilson

is a retired Inquirer book editor who blogs at http://booksinq.blogspot.com

Diane Ravitch was for No Child Left Behind (NCLB) before she was against it.

NCLB became law in January 2002, and Ravitch - a former assistant secretary of education - says her support for it "remained strong" for nearly five years, until Nov. 30, 2006. "I can pinpoint the exact date because that was the day I realized NCLB was a failure," she recounts in The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. The occasion was a conference at the American Enterprise Institute examining "whether the major remedies prescribed by NCLB - especially choice and after-school tutoring - were effective."

As it happened, "only a tiny fraction of eligible students asked to transfer to better schools" - 2 percent or less. Figures for after-school tutoring were not much better: 20 percent of eligible students in New Jersey took advantage of it, but in California only 7 percent; in Colorado, 10 percent; and in Kentucky, 9 percent.

There is nothing partisan in Ravitch's critique of NCLB. The law, she notes, was passed with broad bipartisan support. "In retrospect," she writes, "NCLB seems foreordained. . . . Elected officials of both parties came to accept as secular gospel the idea that testing and accountability would necessarily lead to better schools."

Ravitch's book is a must-read if you want to get some idea of just how chaotic educational thinking in this country has become.

"For the past century or more," she writes, "education reformers have tried out their ideas in the schools. . . . With the best of intentions, reformers have sought to correct deficiencies by introducing new pedagogical techniques, new ways of organizing classrooms, new technologies, new tests, new incentives, and new ways to govern schools. In every instance, reformers believed that their solution was the very one that would transform the schools, make learning fun, raise test scores. . . ."

Instead, Ravitch notes, we find ourselves quite possibly on the way toward "a paradoxical and terrible outcome: higher test scores and worse education."