The Death and Life of the Great American School System

by Diane Ravitch

  It is time, I think, for those who want to improve our schools to focus on the essentials of education. We must make sure that our schools have a strong, coherent, explicit curriculum that is grounded in the liberal arts and sciences, with plenty of opportunity for children to engage in activities and projects that make learning lively. We must ensure that students gain the knowledge they need to understand political debates, scientific phenomena, and the world they live in. We must be sure they are prepared for the responsibilities of democratic citizenship in a complex society. We must take care that our teachers are well educated, not just well trained. We must be sure that schools have the authority to maintain both standards of learning and standards of behavior.

  In this book, I will describe the evidence that changed my views about reforms that once seemed promising. I will explain why I have concluded that most of the reform strategies that school districts, state officials, the Congress, and federal officials are pursuing, that mega-rich foundations are supporting, and that editorial boards are applauding are mistaken. I will attempt to explain how these mistaken policies are corrupting educational values. I will describe the policies that I believe are necessary ingredients in a good system of public education. I will not claim that my ideas will solve all our problems all at once and forever. I will not offer a silver bullet or a magic feather. I do claim, however, that we must preserve American public education, because it is so intimately connected to our concepts of citizenship and democracy and to the promise of American life. In view of the money and power now arrayed on behalf of the ideas and programs that I will criticize, I hope it is not too late.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hijacked! How the Standards Movement Turned Into the Testing Movement

  IN THE FIRST DECADE of the twenty-first century, the leading reform ideas in American education were accountability and choice. These ideas were at the heart of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind program, which he signed into law in January 2002. No Child Left Behind—or NCLB—changed the nature of public schooling across the nation by making standardized test scores the primary measure of school quality. The rise or fall of test scores in reading and mathematics became the critical variable in judging students, teachers, principals, and schools. Missing from NCLB was any reference to what students should learn; this was left to each state to determine.

  I was initially supportive of NCLB. Who could object to ensuring that children mastered the basic skills of reading and mathematics? Who could object to an annual test of those skills? Certainly not I. Didn’t all schools test their students at least once annually?

  As NCLB was implemented, I became increasingly disillusioned. I came to realize that the law bypassed curriculum and standards. Although its supporters often claimed it was a natural outgrowth of the standards movement, it was not. It demanded that schools generate higher test scores in basic skills, but it required no curriculum at all, nor did it raise standards. It ignored such important studies as history, civics, literature, science, the arts, and geography. Though the law required states to test students eventually in science, the science scores didn’t count on the federal scorecard. I saw my hopes for better education turn into a measurement strategy that had no underlying educational vision at all. Eventually I realized that the new reforms had everything to do with structural changes and accountability, and nothing at all to do with the substance of learning. Accountability makes no sense when it undermines the larger goals of education.

  How did testing and accountability become the main levers of school reform? How did our elected officials become convinced that measurement and data would fix the schools? Somehow our nation got off track in its efforts to improve education. What once was the standards movement was replaced by the accountability movement. What once was an effort to improve the quality of education turned into an accounting strategy: Measure, then punish or reward. No education experience was needed to administer such a program. Anyone who loved data could do it. The strategy produced fear and obedience among educators; it often generated higher test scores. But it had nothing to do with education.

  Tests should follow the curriculum. They should be based on the curriculum. They should not replace it or precede it. Students need a coherent foundation of knowledge and skills that grows stronger each year. Knowledge and skills are both important, as is learning to think, debate, and question. A well-educated person has a well-furnished mind, shaped by reading and thinking about history, science, literature, the arts, and politics. The well-educated person has learned how to explain ideas and listen respectfully to others.

  In the 1980s and early 1990s, efforts to revive liberal education in the schools seemed to be gaining ground; many states were reviewing their academic expectations with an eye to strengthening them in all grades. In 1991 and 1992, the agency that I headed in the U.S. Department of Education awarded grants to consortia of professional groups of teachers and scholars to develop voluntary national standards in history, English language arts, science, civics, economics, the arts, foreign languages, geography, and physical education. 1 I acted at the direction of Secretary Lamar Alexander, who believed as I did that all children should have access to a broad education in the arts and sciences.

  The efforts to establish voluntary national standards fell apart in the fall of 1994, when Lynne V. Cheney attacked the not-yet-released history standards for their political bias. As chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Cheney had funded their development along with the Department of Education. Cheney’s scathing critique in the Wall Street Journal opened up a bitter national argument about what history, or rather, whose history, should be taught.2

  Cheney lambasted the standards as the epitome of left-wing political correctness, because they emphasized the nation’s failings and paid scant attention to its great men. The standards document, she said, mentioned Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism nineteen times, the Ku Klux Klan seventeen times, and Harriet Tubman six times, while mentioning Ulysses S. Grant just once and Robert E. Lee not at all. Nor was there any reference to Paul Revere, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk, or the Wright brothers. Cheney told an interviewer that the document was a “warped and distorted version of the American past in which it becomes a story of oppression and failure.”3

  Editorialists and radio talk shows across the country weighed in on the dispute, some siding with Cheney, others defending the standards. Every major newspaper and newsmagazine covered the story of the angry ideological conflict. The controversy quickly became a debate about the role of minority groups and women in American history, which was placed in opposition to the role of great white men. Radio host Rush Limbaugh said the standards should be “flushed down the toilet,” but they were endorsed by many editorial boards and historians.4

  Unfortunately, the historians at the University of California at Los Angeles who supervised the writing of the history standards did not anticipate that their political views and their commitment to teaching social history through the lens of race, class, and gender would encounter resistance outside the confines of academe. They insisted that their critics were narrow-minded conservatives who opposed the standards’ efforts to open American history to a diversity of cultures.

  Meanwhile, in D.C., the administration changed from George H. W. Bush to Bill Clinton, and in the turnover, there was no provision for oversight of the standards, no process by which they might be reviewed and revised, again and again, to remove any hint of political bias. After Cheney raised a ruckus about the history standards, elected officials in Washington wanted nothing to do with them. The Clinton administration disowned them, pointing out that it had not commissioned them. In January 1995, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution condemning them by a vote of 99-1 (the lone dissenter, a senator from Louisiana, thought the resolution was not strong enough).5 After the vitriolic front-page battle over the history standards, the subject of standards, curriculum, and content became radioactive to politica
l leaders.

  I was disappointed by the national history standards, but unlike Cheney I thought they could be fixed by editing. When the controversy first exploded into public view, I told Education Week that the document was a very good start, but “they should keep working on it, make it more parsimonious, and get out whatever seems to be biased in terms of politics. It shouldn’t have a whiff of political partisanship from the left or the right.” I wrote a letter to the New York Times, which had editorially supported the standards, warning that the history standards had to be “depoliticized,” because they were jeopardizing the bipartisan movement to set voluntary national standards.6 In the Chronicle of Higher Education, I argued that the history standards should be revised, not abandoned. I worried that the controversy would “lead to the demise of the entire effort to set national standards, even in less contentious fields, such as mathematics and science.” I insisted that national standards would succeed only as long as they were voluntary and nonpartisan and avoided “any effort to impose ‘correct’ answers on disputed questions.” I concluded that the project to develop national standards was at a crossroads; either we as a nation would recognize that much more time was needed to do it right, or the entire effort would be abandoned. I predicted, “The questions that will soon be answered are: Will we learn from our mistakes and keep trying? Or will we give up?”7

  In hindsight, it is clear that we gave up, in reaction to the media firestorm. The politicians whose leadership and endorsement were needed to establish national standards lost interest. Senators, congressmen, and governors watched the spectacle and determined that it was political suicide to get involved in the contretemps. To Republicans, national standards were anathema, a policy that would turn our education system over to leftist academics, a point that Lynne Cheney drove home again and again in her newspaper articles and public appearances. To Democrats, national standards sounded like a good idea—after all, Bill Clinton had run for office with a promise to establish national standards and assessments8—but after the debacle associated with the history standards, the Clinton administration backed away from national standards.

  Even as the history standards came into disrepute, the Clinton administration was writing its own legislation to promote standards and accountability. Having seen the political disaster that erupted around the national history standards, administration strategists concluded that it would be politically impossible to forge federally directed academic standards, even voluntary ones. So they punted: The law they wrote said that every state should write its own standards, pick its own tests, and be accountable for achievement. The task of identifying what students should learn—the heart of curriculum standards—was left to each state.

  The Clinton administration’s Goals 2000 program gave the states federal money to write their own academic standards, but most of the state standards were vague when it came to any curriculum content. It seemed that the states had learned from the battle over the history standards that it was better to say nothing than to provoke controversy by setting out any real curriculum standards. Most state standards were windy rhetoric, devoid of concrete descriptions of what students should be expected to know and be able to do. One exception was Massachusetts, which produced stellar state standards in every subject area. But most states wrote social studies standards in which history was mentioned tangentially, with few or no references to names, events, or ideas. The states seemed to understand that avoiding specifics was the best policy; that standards were best if they were completely noncontroversial; and that standards would survive scrutiny only if they said nothing and changed nothing.

  A few examples should suffice. A typical middle-school history standard says that “students will demonstrate an understanding of how ideas, events, and conditions bring about change.” A typical high school history standard says that “students will demonstrate an understanding of the chronology and concepts of history and identify and explain historical relationships.” Or, “explain, analyze, and show connections among patterns of change and continuity by applying key historical concepts, such as time, chronology, causality, change, conflict, complexity, and movement.”9 Since these statements do not refer to any actual historical event, they do not require students to know any history. They contain no historical content that students might analyze, debate, or reflect on. Unfortunately, they are typical of most state standards in history. The much-maligned voluntary national history standards of 1994, by contrast, are intellectually challenging, because they expected students to discuss the causes and consequences of the American Revolution, the Great Depression, world wars, and other major events in American history. Without specificity and clarity, standards are nothing more than vacuous verbiage.

  State standards for the English language arts are similarly vapid. Few states refer to a single significant work of literature that students are expected to read. In most states, the English standards avoid any mention of specific works of fiction or nonfiction or specific major authors. Instead, they babble about how students “interact with text,” apply “word analysis and vocabulary skills to comprehend selections,” “relate reading to prior knowledge and experience and make connections to related information,” “make text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world connections,” use “language processes” as “meaning-making processes,” engage in “meaningful literacy activities,” and “use effective reading strategies to achieve their purposes in reading.” Students should certainly think about what they read, but they should read something worth thinking about.10

  The standards movement died in 1995, when the controversy over the national history standards came to a high boil. And the state standards created as a substitute for national standards steered clear of curriculum content. So, with a few honorable exceptions, the states wrote and published vague documents and called them standards. Teachers continued to rely on their textbooks to determine what to teach and test. The tests and textbooks, written for students across the nation, provided a low-level sort of national standard. Business leaders continued to grouse that they had to spend large amounts of money to train new workers; the media continued to highlight the mediocre performance of American students on international tests; and colleges continued to report that about a third of their freshmen needed remediation in the basic skills of reading, writing, and mathematics.

  When Governor George W. Bush of Texas was elected president in 2000, he decided that education reform would be his first priority. He brought with him the Texas plan: testing and accountability. Bush’s No Child Left Behind program melded smoothly with a central feature of the Clinton administration’s Goals 2000 program: namely, leaving it to the states to set their own standards and pick their own tests. Under the terms of NCLB, schools that did not demonstrate adequate progress toward the goal of making every student proficient in math and English by 2014 would be subject to increasingly onerous sanctions. But it was left to each state to decide what “proficiency” meant. So the states, most of which had vague and meaningless standards, were left free to determine what children should learn and how well they should learn it.11 In effect, they were asked to grade themselves by creating tests that almost all children could eventually pass. NCLB was all sticks and no carrots. Test-based accountability—not standards—became our national education policy. There was no underlying vision of what education should be or how one might improve schools.

  NCLB introduced a new definition of school reform that was applauded by Democrats and Republicans alike. In this new era, school reform was characterized as accountability, high-stakes testing, data-driven decision making, choice, charter schools, privatization, deregulation, merit pay, and competition among schools. Whatever could not be measured did not count. It was ironic that a conservative Republican president was responsible for the largest expansion of federal control in the history of American education. It was likewise ironic that Democrats embraced market reforms and other initiatives that traditionally had been favored by
Republicans.

  Nothing better portrayed the new climate than a charged battle during and after the 2008 presidential campaign over the definition of the term “reformer.” During the campaign, the New Republic chided Democratic candidate Barack Obama for waffling on education reform. A real reformer, said this usually liberal magazine, was someone who supports competition between schools, charter schools, test-based accountability, performance pay for teachers, and No Child Left Behind, while being ready to battle the teachers’ unions. This agenda, the article asserted, was shared by influential center-left think tanks in Washington, D.C., such as the Center for American Progress.12

  After Obama’s election, the media vigorously debated the new president’s likely choice for secretary of education. For a brief time, it appeared that the new president might pick his main campaign adviser on education, scholar Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University. This prospect alarmed the champions of corporate-style reform, because Darling-Hammond was known as an advocate of teacher professionalism and a critic of Teach for America; the new breed of reformers thought she was too friendly with the teachers’ unions. Consequently, writers in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and other publications warned President-elect Obama not to choose Darling-Hammond, but to select a “real” reformer who supported testing, accountability, and choice. True reformers, said the pundits and editorialists, fought the teachers’ unions and demanded merit pay based on student test scores. True reformers closed low-performing schools and fired administrators and teachers. True reformers opposed teacher tenure. Never mind that these had long been the central tenets of the Republican approach to education reform.13