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I recently fin­ished Diane Rav­itch’s book, “The Death and Life of the Great Amer­i­can School Sys­tem: How Test­ing and Choice are Under­min­ing Edu­ca­tion.” This book has been get­ting quite a bit of atten­tion even out­side of edu­ca­tional cir­cles so I fig­ured I should read it.

Rav­itch is an his­to­rian of edu­ca­tion and, viewed as a his­tory, I think the book is really great. It con­cisely traces a few impor­tant strands of recent edu­ca­tion his­tory: how the school stan­dards move­ment got turned into the test­ing move­ment, the rise of the busi­ness model of edu­ca­tion and “account­abil­ity,” the segregation-tainted past of “schools of choice,” the con­cep­tion and effects of No Child Left Behind. If you don’t feel like read­ing the book, though, Rav­itch cov­ers most of these top­ics ( maybe less com­pre­hen­sively) on the Edu­ca­tion Week Bridg­ing Dif­fer­ence blog she co-writes with another influ­en­tial edu­ca­tor, Deb­o­rah Meier.

Ravitch’s con­clu­sions in this book are par­tic­u­larly notable because they rep­re­sent a sig­nif­i­cant depar­ture from her for­mer views. While she used to approve of stan­dard­ized test­ing and sup­port market-based edu­ca­tion reform, she has come to reject them pretty much entirely. Test­ing is bad because the tests are often unre­li­able and invalid, and pro­vide strong incen­tives for peo­ple in con­trol of edu­ca­tion to game the sys­tem, cheat, or at very least to nar­row the cur­ricu­lum to just the tested sub­jects. Market-based edu­ca­tion reform is bad because there isn’t much evi­dence that choice and char­ters actu­ally get any results. (She cites a ton of stud­ies on both of these points).

In the end, Rav­itch rec­om­mends a strength­en­ing of pub­lic edu­ca­tion. This can be best achieved by doing away with the high-stakes test­ing, estab­lish­ing rig­or­ous and coher­ent cur­ricu­lums in all sub­jects (not just read­ing and math), mak­ing sure that teach­ers are not only trained in ped­a­gogy but are also experts in their sub­ject mate­r­ial, treat­ing teach­ers as autonomous pro­fes­sion­als, and help­ing strug­gling schools rather than clos­ing them down, etc. They’re all pretty con­ser­v­a­tive rec­om­men­da­tions — noth­ing rad­i­cal here.

But I’m not as happy with the book’s pre­scrip­tions for edu­ca­tion as I am with its his­tor­i­cal sec­tions, for two main reasons:

1. Hav­ing explained how eas­ily the move­ment for cur­ricu­lum stan­dards was dis­rupted in the 9os, why would Rav­itch then go on to put so much stock for future reform in strength­en­ing stan­dards? This is at best ide­al­is­tic, pos­si­bly naïve. There is no rea­son to think that polit­i­cal con­sen­sus on what should be taught will be eas­ier to reach now than 15 years ago. Maybe this is ide­ally the best thing we could do for school reform. But, if it’s exceed­ingly unlikely to hap­pen, then we need to start look­ing at next best options, and how to move for­ward with­out such curriculum.
2. Ravitch’s dis­ap­proval of school choice and char­ter schools is based upon their dis­ap­point­ing results in terms of rais­ing test scores. But, she dis­ap­proves of the tests, so why should their inabil­ity to raise tests scores itself be an indict­ment against them? And, more impor­tantly, many peo­ple sup­port school choice and char­ter schools at least partly inde­pen­dently of their abil­ity to raise test scores. School choice and char­ter schools might be valu­able sim­ply inso­far as they afford par­ents and stu­dents addi­tional free­dom. Or, they might be good because they achieve the same mediocre results but at a lower cost. Fur­ther­more, just because school choice and char­ter schools haven’t yet pro­duced astound­ing results doesn’t show that they won’t in the future — most pro­grams are in their infan­cies. An edu­ca­tion mar­ket, with its increased flex­i­bil­ity, may still have a bet­ter chance of inno­vat­ing to stu­dents’ ben­e­fit than the cur­rent pub­lic school sys­tem. And any­way, none of the choice or char­ter pro­grams stud­ied are what the staunchest, most free mar­ket of reform­ers really have in mind. They could still main­tain that market-based edu­ca­tion *done their way* will work. So Ravitch’s con­dem­na­tion of choice and char­ters is maybe a bit hasty, although I think she’s right that the evi­dence to date is not fan­tas­tic and that it is being overblown or ignored by ide­o­log­i­cal pro­po­nents of choice.

So, basi­cally a solid book. I’m def­i­nitely still chew­ing it over. While I’m pretty sym­pa­thetic to the market-based edu­ca­tion reforms that Rav­itch has come to reject, my faith in them is by no means unlim­ited. I think that the argu­ments for and against school choice/charter schools are usu­ally pretty tired, and I plan to explore some of the finer points of the issue in the com­ing months and years. This timely book serves as a solid start­ing point for under­stand­ing school choice/charter school (and test­ing) skepticism.