Via Jerry Becker: Diane Ravitch: "WILL CURRENT SCHOOL REFORMS IMPROVE EDUCATION?"
Diane Ravitch: "WILL CURRENT
SCHOOL REFORMS IMPROVE EDUCATION?"
Dr. Ravitch gave the talk at the opening session of the annual
meeting of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM] in
Philadelphia April 25, 2012. Her presentation contained a few changes
that, she says, "I always make when I speak." It is an
excellent talk.
She begins by commenting that American education is now at a
critical juncture. We have a full-blown and powerful reform movement
that offers solutions without any evidence. Schools across the nation
are adopting remedies that are not only unproven but in some cases
have been tried and failed.
As a historian of American education, Dr. Ravitch is writing
about the rise and fall of education reforms and fads. Over the
twentieth century, reform movements came and went with frequency. By
contrast to the many reforms of the past century, the current reform
movement is unusual because it did not start with educators. Its
leaders are entrepreneurs, economists, foundation leaders, think tank
commentators, journalists, and people from the high-tech sector, the
big corporations, and Wall Street, she says.
She prefers to call it the corporate reform movement because it uses the language of corporate America. It relies on a strategy of competition, choice, testing, and accountability. It believes that teachers must be incentivized with rewards and punishments tied to test scores. It views test scores as profits and losses. It seeks a return on investment in the form of higher test scores. It believes that schools with low scores should be closed in the same way that a chain store would be closed and reopened with a new name. It likes the idea of firing staff that don't get higher scores. And, of course, it assumes unquestioningly that standardized tests are reliable, valid, infallible measures of not only student performance, but teacher quality and school quality.
The attachment to this note gives the full text of Dr.
Ravitch's excellent presentation.
Note: The talk was videotaped and is available at the NCTM
website: http://www.nctm.org/
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