The Death and Life of the Great American School System

The Death and Life of the Great American School System:
How Testing and Choice are undermining Education by Diane Ravitch

From the subtitle of this book, you would think it was written by some liberal former educator. But actually Diane Ravitch is a former Assistant Secretary of Education under President H. W. Bush, and a one time strong supporter of NCLB, charter schools and choice. But Ravitch also is a Research Professor of Education at New York University, who believes in researching and examining whether these decades long methods have actually succeeded. Ravitch, once a passionate advocate for these conservative policies of testing and accountability, school choice, privatization, and business-style management, powerfully shows that these reform methods actually leave students trained to take tests but not prepared to participate in the 21st-century economy.

Changes she suggests include curricula that emphasizes all subject areas and not just reading and mathematics. She stresses the importance of having a comprehensive curriculum that teaches students to think, analyze, question and research the content in social studies, literature, science, music and art. Ravitch emphasizes that students need to be taught these subjects from professional educators rather than politicians, business leaders, and philanthropists, who currently are running and controlling the education system.

She systematically blows holes in the effectiveness of NCLB with the emphasis on testing and accountability. She states that no single policy has warped classroom life more than the NCLB testing regime. And she skewers the Obama Administration and Secretary Duncan for their obsession with charter schools, in spite of a 2009 study, funded by pro-charter groups, that show that 83% of charter schools do not perform any better than the public schools, in fact 37% had learning gains that were significantly below those of local public schools.

The most frightening chapter in the book is called, the 'Billionaire Boy's Club". Ravitch focuses on three major corporate foundations in education (Gates, Walton and Broad Foundations). These three have the money to "buy" and dictate whatever they want. Ravitch illustrates that even when the results of their more than adequately financed education approaches fail, they choose to ignore these negative results, and shift their money elsewhere. But the public never hears about the failures.

While this book is definitely worth reading by any person who cares about public education and would like to know the truth behind the effectiveness of NCLB, testing and charter schools, there are three shortcomings in the book.

First, Ravitch states that “American education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them, for it threatens to destroy public education. Who will stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?” However Ravitch fails to point out that this current obsession is not the making of the public school system or educators, instead it is the creation of the corporations that will profit from this approach, and the politicians that are beholding to those corporations and not to their constituents, who actually use the public schools.

Second, Ravitch fails to specify that not all public schools are failing. It is primarily the urban schools with low-income kids that need help and improvement. Thousands of kids throughout this country go to good public schools, many of them are excellent.

Third, her suggestions of what should be done to improve the country's education system and the "low performing schools" are offered without a prescription of how to implement these changes, especially when the current education system is controlled and dictated by politicians, business leaders, and ideologically driven philanthropists. My question is how do you get the people in power, like Obama & Duncan, to start listening to the people that truly understand education? People like Diane Ravitch, Linda Darling-Hammond, Jonathan Kozol and others.

As I stated earlier, you should read this book in spite of these three shortcomings.