I have a friend who teaches in the Texas public school system.  Every time he sends an e-mail during the school year, it seems that he is preparing the students for the state tests, the students are taking the tests, or he is writing reports evaluating the results of the tests.  I always respond with "When do you actually teach?"  At the end of the last school year, he wrote that there were only two weeks left, but that there was nothing to do because they had just finished the state testing and most of his students wouldn't show up for the last two weeks.  I was baffled.  Aren't there courses to teach?  Material to cover?  But his prediction was accurate: for the last two weeks, he said, only four or five students bothered to come, so they just watched movies and then went home.  Well, he couldn't go home, but the few students did. 

Diane Ravitch's recent book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, is a depressing critique of how wrong-headed the current received wisdom about the state of and the proposed remedies for the American educational system are.  The title of the book is misleading, since it implies that life is returning, when in fact the momentum toward more testing and more choice is unabated.  Moreover, it has bipartisan support (President Obama's "Race to the Top" differs only negligibly from Bush's "No Child Left Behind," and Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, based his career on this business-modeled paradigm) and it has huge infusions of money from philanthropic organizations, particularly the Gates Foundation, the Eli Broad Foundation, and the Walton Foundation.  Some of the support may be well-intentioned (but then 'well-intentioned' is never an unalloyed compliment), but it is coercive and based on the faulty analogy that education should be run like a business and that educators, i.e. professionals with actual experience teaching, are usually an impediment to successful schools.  One egregious, but extremely popular, representation of the current ideas is the film Waiting for "Superman," which seemed to have only two ideas: teachers unions are bad and school choice is good.  The Gates Foundation gave $1M to publicize the movie. 

The first obsession that Ravitch debunks is that of constant testing as a measure of schools' and individual teachers' effectiveness.  First, as both NCLB and Race to the Top require, testing focuses only on reading and math.  Thus, as schools spend excessive amounts of time preparing for the tests, other subjects are necessarily slighted, since nothing depends on them.  Second, the tests, which are always multiple choice on bubble sheets, are notoriously unreliable and show little validity.  Third, the tests frighten schools into "gaming" them--sometimes through outright cheating (as several scandals have revealed), more often through lowering the "cut rate," therefore making it seem as if schools' scores are improving.  Fourth, inordinate amounts of time are spent on test-taking strategies instead of actual learning.  And fifth, and perhaps most alarmingly, the schools and teachers are punished--often by schools being closed and teachers being fired--for failure to make year-to-year improvement as measured by misleading testing and interpretation.  In the place of educators who are fired, non-professionals (again, often well-intentioned) are brought in to take charge.  Few of them stay.  Meanwhile, an atmosphere of fear and mistrust becomes prevalent among teachers who are experienced.  The so-called "reformers" invariably rant against teachers unions and tenure, but since 50% of all beginning teachers leave the profession within the first five years, the much greater problem is retaining good teachers.  The states that have the most dismal records in education (even by the reformers' own bubble testing methods) are all non-union states.  The states that have the highest rankings all have strong unions.  In Finland, the country that both sides of the debate cite as having the most effective educational system, the teachers are 100% unionized.  No one can reasonably be against "accountability," but it's clear that the carrot-and-stick (with much more emphasis on the sticks), business-modeled testing system that is drawing so much political and financial support is restrictive, unreliable, and misguided.

The second part of Ravitch's attack is on the supposed panacea of school choice, in its first incarnation the voucher system, now more often in the form of charter schools.  Despite all the ballyhoo, there are few data that actually support the effectiveness of charter schools.  There are good ones, dreadful ones, and a lot of mediocre ones.  And this is in spite of the fact that they often get increased funding from foundations and from the government, money that could have been used to improve public schools.  In addition, charter schools are likely to attract students from families that are the most motivated and that understand the system the best.  Most of them have a dismal record in admitting students who are disabled or for whom English is a second language, since such students are less likely to apply and would probably drag test scores down. Meanwhile, these students are pushed back into the public schools, which then need additional resources and commitment to teach them.  When the idea of charter schools was first incubated, they were intended to be laboratories for innovative teaching methods that could then be adopted by public schools; instead, they tend to be insular and focus on exactly those two areas that are subject to state testing.  Since there are many fewer requirements for the establishment and running of charter schools (these vary widely from state to state), there are significantly fewer controls.  Many are run, again on the business model, by for-profit businesses and staffed by non-educators.  Despite at least a decade of a very mixed record for charter schools, for most politicians of both parties and most grant-dispersing foundations, they remain the solution of choice.

Ravitch is in a particularly advantageous position to make her arguments because she was once an advocate of both testing and choice, indeed was an assistant secretary in the Department of Education under Bush 43.  And then she experienced her Aha moment when, as a historian and professor of education, she studied the actual data and came to realize what a failure the current prescriptions are.  In passing, she makes two other important points.  One is that if you look at the best American schools, they're actually very good indeed and outperform the schools of other countries by almost all measures.  But these best schools tend to be in affluent and racially homogeneous communities.  The current obsessions deny that poverty or family structure or other "extrinsic" factors are important: the boogeyman is bad teachers.  A second point is that, despite the enormous successes of American education, it is impossible to look back over the last century and find a moment when it wasn't "in crisis" and when there wasn't a silver bullet on the horizon to fix the problems.  When I was growing up in the 50s, the crisis was described in best-selling books like Rudolf Flesch's Why Johnny Can't Read and, of course, the Sputnik flight provoked a panic about our falling behind in science.  But, as Ravitch insists, there are no magic bullets.  Improvements in education come about slowly, include a strong emphasis on content, i.e. what is actually taught, and understand how inextricably education is linked with such issues as poverty. 

My 45 years as a teacher were spent in higher education, as it's called, but one of the reasons that Ravitch's book is so troubling is that I've seen the business model increasingly infiltrate university teaching.  Students, we are told, are "customers," shopping for colleges.  It's more important to build a new Welcome Center so that prospective customers won't be confused about where to start their shopping than to increase the size and resources of the library.  Innovation is stifled in the name of  "assessment" and "rubrics," two words that made retirement seem increasingly attractive.  This, too, shall pass, I hope.  During 45 years in academia, I've seen a lot of fads that suddenly piddled out.  For a decade or so, everyone talked about holistic grading.  I haven't heard the word 'holistic' in many years.  We'll see whether Ravitch is right in stressing the death and life of American education.  We can only hope that she has the sequence correct.