As is often the case with apostates, Diane Ravitch exchanged one form of extremism for another. Once a conservative critic of America’s education system, Ravitch turned sharply to the Left. Her new Left-wing activism has more problems than her previous conservative fanaticism about vouchers, standardized tests, and the problems with public schools.
In her new memoir, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else, Ravitch charts how she went from a Houston childhood to a conservative education critic, arguing for school vouchers, consulted by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, and positioned in Republican think tanks. She finally becomes a liberal who quotes John Maynard Keyes and writes the following: “I believe that the Jesus of the New Testament was woke.”
Ravitch claims that her change came in the early 2000s because the facts changed her mind. “Making testing the central measure of schooling crushed the joy of learning and discouraged both students and teachers,” she writes, “The joy of learning was no longer a goal; it became irrelevant and disappeared. Using public money to fund privately managed charters and vouchers disrupted communities without improving education. It also diverted funds and top students away from public schools, which left them with a disproportionate share of the neediest students.”
Ravitch rhapsodizes about Michael Phelps, Simone Biles, and “the brilliant accomplishments of artists, musicians, actors, and many others who achieved success in fields that had no connection to the ability to find the right answer to a multiple-choice question. I expect that even geniuses like Albert Einstein would have produced low test scores because of their wild, unconventional, and unpredictable ways of thinking.”
NEBRASKA WILL OPT INTO TRUMP’S FEDERAL SCHOOL CHOICE PROGRAM
Ravitch notes that she “still believes in standards, but not so much in standardized testing, which has built-in biases and is best at measuring family income, family education, and the ability to answer questions on standardized tests. I believe in judging people by their experience, their integrity, their capability, and their character.”
I don’t have Ravitch’s advanced degrees or years of experience, but I was a teacher for several years, and this is nonsense. It’s true that the emphasis on standardized testing can become an obsession. Yet it remains the only way to tabulate how the students are retaining the very standards that Ravitch believes in upholding. You aim for high standards in the classroom, then you test the students on what they’ve learned. You also learn to spot the brilliant, unconventional thinkers who may not test well. Einsteins do come along, but not that often.
Ravitch is particularly unfair to Geoffrey Canada and his project to break poor black kids out of poverty. In the 1980s and 1990s, Canada, a black educator, came across statistics that changed the way he looked at the problems of poor black people. Canada saw a huge discrepancy between the vocabularies of poor people and everyone else, and argued that in the first few years of life, babies from poor black families hear far fewer words than whites — and that what they hear can be negative. Hearing fewer words and negative words had a physiological effect on the brains of children. Infants who are read to with support and kindness do better on tests, in conversation, in relationships, and in job interviews.
Paul Tough, the author of Whatever it Takes, a book about Canada, summarizes it this way: ”However you measure parenting, middle-class parents tend to do it very differently from poor parents—and the path they follow, in turn, tends to give their children an array of advantages, both cognitive and non cognitive: a bigger vocabulary, better brain chemistry, a more assertive attitude. As [researcher Annette Lareau] pointed out, kids from poor families may be nicer, they might be happier, they might be more polite—but in countless ways, the manner in which they are raised puts them at a disadvantage in the measures that count in contemporary American society.”
In 1990, Canada opened the Harlem Children’s Zone, a social experiment to change the way poor black kids are read to, spoken to, and even fed. In 1997, the Zone started a program encompassing 24 blocks. In 2007, it covered almost 100 blocks. The results are amazing: “Of the 161 four-year-olds that entered the Harlem Gems in the 2008-2009 school year, 17% had a school readiness classification of delayed or very delayed. By the end of the year, there were no students classified as ‘very delayed,’ and the percentage of ‘advanced’ had gone from 33.5% to 65.2%, with another 8.1% at ‘very advanced,’ up from only 2%.” In the New York Times, Canada summed up his philosophy: “For me, this is not an intellectual debate. This is quite literally about saving young lives. For parents in devastated neighborhoods such as Harlem, the decision to send their child to the local failure factory or a successful charter school is no choice.”
Ravitch dismisses Canada far too glibly, criticizing him for sometimes holding an entire class back a year because they’re not ready. She is focused on results, but downplays an educator who is getting them.
SCHOOL CHOICE GAINS SUPPORT FROM BOTH PARTIES IN NEW POLL
At one point in An Education, which is a well-written and fascinating memoir (if David Brooks being two-faced is your kind of gossip, you’ll be enthralled), Ravitch recalls visiting Hungary when it was a Communist country under Soviet influence in the 1980s. “Young people told us they studied Russian for years but never learned to speak it because they didn’t want to,” she writes. “Teachers said that they were ordered to teach that the anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary in 1956 was a counter-revolution. The textbooks said so.”
There’s a lesson here. America’s schools shouldn’t be lifeless testing factories. They also shouldn’t be woke indoctrination centers.