StickWithANose

I have never been a fan of Diane Ravitch, mostly because of her association with think tanks like Brookings and Hoover. It has been my experience that think tank trolls produce limited [but adequate] research for academic literature while the popular literature they produce for their various institutions is craptacular propaganda at best.

So, it came as a bit of a shock when I read a series of posts at Politico by Ravitch in which she spoke truth to power. Stunning…

[T]he $5 billion (or $4 point something billion) is money that Secretary Arne Duncan is using to push the states and the nation to adopt what he believes is necessary to reform American education. The key ideas are these: lots more charter schools; lots more privatization; evaluate teachers based on the test scores of their students; open more alternate routes into teaching to break the grip of professionalism…

The problem here is obvious: What if Washington doesn’t know best? What if the “reform” ideas are wrong? Just a few weeks ago, a respected Stanford University study reported that 80% or more of charter schools are no better than or worse than their neighborhood public school. Why replace struggling public schools with worse charter schools? There is a ton of evidence that evaluating teachers based on student test scores is a lousy idea (see the work of Jesse Rothstein at Princeton, for example).

And then there is this nagging question: If Duncan knows so much about how to reform American education, why didn’t he reform Chicago’s schools? A report came out a couple of weeks ago from the Civic Committee of Chicago (“Still Left Behind”) saying that Chicago’s much-touted score gains in the past several years were phony, that they were generated after the state lowered the passing mark on the state tests, that the purported gains did not show up on the federal tests, and that Chicago’s high schools are still failing. On the respected federal tests (NAEP), Chicago is one of the lowest performing cities in the nation.

Why is Washington pushing “reform” ideas that have so little evidence behind them, as well as ideas that will positively harm public education in America?

This comment from another post really hit home for me, and I’m glad to see her call out Obama for using Darling-Hammond as a campaign ploy to be tossed aside once he entered office.

The one educator close to Obama who actually has experience in the schools–his chief policy advisor Linda Darling-Hammond–was demonized by the new breed of non-educators and their media flacks, and she has returned to Stanford University. There was no room apparently in this administration for someone who had been deeply involved in school reform for many years, not as an entrepreneur or a think-tank expert, but as an educator.

It looks like Obama’s education policy will be a third term for President George W. Bush. This is not change I can believe in.

Good for Ravitch! I am glad to see someone at a major think tank using their position to act as a counter-balance to the corporate capture of education policy. Although, I’m not sure that the corporate masters of Brookings and Hoover will be as pleased as I am…