A Major--and Courageoous-"About-Face"
This week, in the Wall Street Journal, Diane Ravitch, a leading educational figure, has produced an seminal article titled Why I Changed My Mind About School Reform. In a total reversal of her long advocacy for ideas such as school choice, accountability, “No child left behind” (NCLB) and charter schools, she makes the statement
“…deregulation and privately managed charter schools” are “not the answer to the deep-seated problems of American education. If anything, they represent tinkering around the edges of the system. They affect the lives of tiny numbers of students but do nothing to improve the system that enrolls the other 97%. “
As one example, she discusses the effects of NCLB in the following terms:
The failure to meet mandated goals leads schools to face “draconian penalties—eventually including closure or privatization.” To protect themselves, schools understandably and unfortunately turned to the provision which “permitted every state to define ‘proficiency’ as it chose.” The end result was that “many states announced impressive gains.” But when the students were tested on a standard, well developed instrument, (the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP]), “…students improved not at all.”
In other words, the NCLB led the states to dumb down “their standards so that they could claim to be making progress. Some states declared that between 80%-90% of their students were proficient, but on the federal test only a third or less were.” And this was after “hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in test-preparation materials… In short, accountability turned into a nightmare for American schools.”
She concludes with the simple, but profound statement “What we need is not a marketplace, but a coherent curriculum that prepares all students.” She is absolutely on target. No area proves this more than reading. Saddled with an incoherent system of phonics –“balanced” with a bit of whole language, children are doomed to fail. And fail they do. That’s why reading failure rates across the country hover around 40%. Sadly, it is not because we lack the knowledge required for a successful reading curriculum. It is solely because the educational establishment refuses to give up the failed system and move on to one that actually works.
Those interested in seeing Dr. Ravitch’s full set of comments can find them at
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704869304575109443305343962.html
