The Death and Life of the Great American School System

by Diane Ravitch

  In the spring of 2009, Dan Katzir, the managing director of the Broad Foundation, reflected on what the foundation had learned after a decade of investing many millions in urban school reform. Katzir said he and his colleagues had learned that thousands of private sector managers—primarily MBAs—are eager to work in urban education, installing new operating procedures. They learned that human resource departments in big city school systems can be streamlined to hire teachers in a more timely fashion. They learned that charter schools such as KIPP, Aspire, Green Dot, and Uncommon Schools get great results for low-income and minority students. They also learned that some of their investments did not “pay off.” They were disappointed that many of the principal-training programs they supported did not produce higher student achievement. They saw progress halted in San Diego and Oakland when the leadership changed. Having learned these lessons, the foundation identified opportunities for future investment. Katzir said the foundation would support efforts to extend the school day and school year; merit pay for teachers based on student test scores; national standards and tests; and charter schools. It would take care to invest in communities where there was a mayor in charge, an appointed school board accountable to the city council, or a “near unanimous” elected school board, so as to ensure stability and minimize conflict over the reform agenda.38

  The Broad Foundation invested millions of dollars in charter schools and charter management organizations including KIPP, Green Dot, Aspire, Pacific Charter School Development, the NewSchools Venture Fund, and Uncommon Schools.39

  It invested millions in organizations that bypass traditional routes into teaching and school leadership, including Teach for America and New Leaders for New Schools.

  It invested millions in programs to train school board members, administrators, and superintendents, principally by funding its own training programs.

  It invested millions to improve the management in school districts such as Chicago, Prince George’s County in Maryland, Charlotte-Mecklenburg in North Carolina, Denver, the District of Columbia, New York City, and Long Beach, California.

  It invested millions in advocacy and think tanks such as the Center for American Progress (whose leader John Podesta was co-chairman of President-elect Obama’s transition team); the California Charter School Association; the Center for Education Reform; the Council for the Great City Schools; the Council of Chief State School Officers; the National Governors Association; the Thomas B. Fordham Institute; the American Enterprise Institute; the Black Alliance for Education Options; Education Sector; and Education Trust. Many of these groups also received funding from the Gates Foundation.

  It invested millions to subsidize pay-for-performance programs for teachers in several cities, including Houston, Chicago, and Minneapolis, and in programs to pay students to get higher test scores and grades in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

  It invested millions to pay for public relations for the New York City Department of Education, and it underwrote coverage of K-12 education reform issues by the public television network, the Educational Broadcasting Corporation.40

  The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation has been extraordinarily generous in supporting the arts and medical research, without trying to redefine how art should be created or how medical research should be conducted. In education, however, the foundation’s investments have focused on Eli Broad’s philosophy that schools should be redesigned to function like corporate enterprises. Eli Broad made his vast fortune in industries for which he had no special training, and his foundation embraces the belief that neither school superintendents nor principals need to be educators. His foundation includes educators in its training programs, but it seems to prefer people with a private sector background. Presumably the educators who are trained by the Broad Foundation learn the skills and mind-set of corporate executives, which they can utilize when they return to their districts.

  The Broad Foundation pursues strategies that would deprofessionalize education, uses bonuses to motivate (or “incentivize”) teachers and students, and seeks to replace neighborhood schools with a competitive marketplace of choices.

  This agenda is now shared by the Gates Foundation, along with several other major foundations, including the Robertson Foundation (assets in excess of $1 billion) and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation (assets in excess of $1 billion). Together, these foundations wield immense economic and political power. During the 2008 campaign the Gates and Broad foundations jointly contributed $60 million to launch a project to make education reform a national campaign issue, while advocating for national standards, a longer school day, and merit pay.41

  The Gates-Broad agenda was warmly endorsed by the Obama administration. Both foundations had invested heavily in the programs of Arne Duncan, Obama’s secretary of education, when he was superintendent of the Chicago public schools. Soon after his election, President Obama called for the elimination of state caps on charter schools and endorsed merit pay. Duncan appointed a high-level official from the Gates Foundation to serve as his chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Education. He traveled the country urging mayors to take control of their public schools, an item high on the Broad Foundation’s agenda.

  Secretary Duncan appointed James H. Shelton III, a former program officer for the Gates Foundation, to oversee the $650 million Invest in What Works and Innovation Fund. Shelton worked previously for McKinsey & Company as a management consultant and later launched education-related businesses. He had also been a partner in the NewSchools Venture Fund, which describes itself as “a venture philanthropy firm working to transform public education by supporting education entrepreneurs and connecting their work to systems change.” The NewSchools Venture Fund helped to launch many charter management organizations and other nonprofit and for-profit agencies. The fund was a beneficiary of the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and many other foundations. 42

  As he began his term in office, Secretary Duncan had charge of $100 billion that Congress had authorized to benefit education in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008. Of the total, Duncan set aside $4.3 billion to promote education reform in what he called the “Race to the Top” fund. To design and manage the Race to the Top, Duncan selected Joanne S. Weiss, a partner and chief operating officer of the NewSchools Venture Fund. Weiss is an education entrepreneur who had previously led several education businesses that sold products and services to schools and colleges. The regulations for the Race to the Top fund excluded any states that limited the number of charter schools or that prohibited a linkage between teacher and principal evaluations and student test scores.

  When the regulations for the Race to the Top were released in 2009, Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute described the new federal program as “NCLB 2: The Carrot That Feels Like a Stick.” Petrilli liked ideas such as evaluating teachers based in part on test scores, pushing the expansion of charter schools, and expanding alternate routes into teaching. But the heavily prescriptive nature of the program, he said, marked the death of federalism. Instead of asking states for their best ideas, the Obama administration “has published a list of 19 of its best ideas, few of which are truly ‘evidence-based,’ regardless of what President Obama says, and told states to adopt as many of them as possible if they want to get the money. It’s as if a bunch of do-gooders sat together at the NewSchools Venture Fund summit and brainstormed a list of popular reform ideas, and are now going to force them upon the states. (Wait, I think that is how this list got developed.)”43

  Now that the ideas promoted by the venture philanthropies were securely lodged at the highest levels of the Obama administration, policymakers and journalists listened carefully to Bill Gates. In a 2009 interview with Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of the Washington Post, Gates signaled a new direction for his foundation. Hiatt wrote, “You might call it the Obama-Duncan-Gates-Rhee philosophy of education reform.” It also was the Bloomberg-Klein-Broad philosophy of education reform. Gates
said that his foundation intended to help successful charter organizations such as KIPP replicate as quickly as possible and to invest in improving teacher effectiveness. Gates asserted that there was no connection between teacher quality and such things as experience, certification, advanced degrees, or even deep knowledge of one’s subject matter (at least below tenth grade). So, he suggested, the money now going to pay teachers for degrees or pensions should go toward preventing attrition in their fourth and fifth years. A few months later, Gates told the National Conference of State Legislatures that “if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Japan would vanish.”44

  As we saw in Chapter 9, the debate about teacher effectiveness is far from simple. It is not easy to identify the “best teachers.” Some economists believe, like Bill Gates, that the best teachers are those who produce the biggest test score gains, so little else matters. Other economists say that a teacher who is “great” one year may not be great the next. Some social scientists question whether student test scores are reliable when used for high-stakes personnel decisions, but Gates apparently was not familiar with these debates. And common sense suggests that any system of measurement that produces a top quartile will also produce three other quartiles.

  Thus, Gates proposes to concentrate on charter schools and teacher effectiveness, as does the Broad Foundation. With characteristic confidence, Gates asserts that effective teaching can be taught, although he offers no examples to prove his point. Given the dubious research on which his foundation invested nearly $2 billion in small schools, one can only hope that he examines the extensive research that challenges his views on teacher effectiveness. He might also ask himself whether schools focused only on standardized tests of basic skills will produce the high achievement and creative thinking that he values and that are necessary to maintain the nation’s innovative edge and its productivity in the future.

  The foundations justify their assertive agenda by pointing to the persistently low performance of public schools in urban districts. Having seen so little progress over recent years, they now seem determined to privatize public education to the greatest extent possible. They are allocating millions of dollars to increase the number of charter schools. They assume that if children are attending privately managed schools, and if teachers and principals are recruited from nontraditional backgrounds, then student achievement will improve dramatically. They base this conclusion on the success of a handful of high-visibility charter schools (including KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools) that in 2009 accounted for about 300 of the nation’s approximately 4,600 charter schools.45

  Given the money and power behind charter schools, it seems likely that they are here to stay. If we continue on the present course, with big foundations and the federal government investing heavily in opening more charter schools, the result is predictable. Charter schools in urban centers will enroll the motivated children of the poor, while the regular public schools will become schools of last resort for those who never applied or were rejected. The regular public schools will enroll a disproportionate share of students with learning disabilities and students who are classified as English-language learners; they will enroll the kids from the most troubled home circumstances, the ones with the worst attendance records and the lowest grades and test scores.

  But why not insist that future charters fulfill their original mission, the one Albert Shanker envisioned in 1988? Why shouldn’t they be the indispensable institutions that rescue the neediest kids? Why shouldn’t they be demonstration centers that show what can be done to help those who can’t succeed in a regular school? Why not redesign them to strengthen public education instead of expecting them to compete with and undercut regular public schools?

  Do we need neighborhood public schools? I believe we do. The neighborhood school is the place where parents meet to share concerns about their children and the place where they learn the practice of democracy. They create a sense of community among strangers. As we lose neighborhood public schools, we lose the one local institution where people congregate and mobilize to solve local problems, where individuals learn to speak up and debate and engage in democratic give-and-take with their neighbors. For more than a century, they have been an essential element of our democratic institutions. We abandon them at our peril.

  Business leaders like the idea of turning the schools into a marketplace where the consumer is king. But the problem with the marketplace is that it dissolves communities and replaces them with consumers. Going to school is not the same as going shopping. Parents should not be burdened with locating a suitable school for their child. They should be able to take their child to the neighborhood public school as a matter of course and expect that it has well-educated teachers and a sound educational program.

  The market serves us well when we want to buy a pair of shoes or a new car or a can of paint; we can shop around for the best value or the style we like. The market is not the best way to deliver public services. Just as every neighborhood should have a reliable fire station, every neighborhood should have a good public school. Privatizing our public schools makes as much sense as privatizing the fire department or the police department. It is possible, but it is not wise. Our society needs a sensible balance between public and private.

  I do not here make an argument against private or religious schools. For over a century, our cities have struck a good balance between public schools, private schools, and religious schools. In particular, the Catholic schools in urban districts have played an effective role as alternatives for families that sought a religious education. Oftentimes, Catholic schools have provided a better civic education than public schools because of their old-fashioned commitment to American ideals and their resistance to the relativism that weakened the fabric of many public schools. Sadly, many Catholic schools have closed because of declining numbers of low-paid religious teachers, which forced their costs to rise, and because of competition from charter schools, which are not only free to families but also subsidized by public and foundation funds. Catholic schools have a wonderful record of educating poor and minority children in the cities. It is a shame that the big foundations have not seen fit to keep Catholic schools alive. Instead, they prefer to create a marketplace of options, even as the marketplace helps to kill off highly successful Catholic schools.

  The market undermines traditional values and traditional ties; it undermines morals, which rest on community consensus. If there is no community consensus, then one person’s sense of morals is as good as the next, and neither takes precedence. This may be great for the entertainment industry, but it is not healthy for children, who need to grow up surrounded by the mores and values of their community. As consumers, we should be free to choose. As citizens, we should have connections to the place we live and be prepared to work together with our neighbors on common problems. When neighbors have no common meeting ground, it is difficult for them to organize on behalf of their self-interest and their community.

  With so much money and power aligned against the neighborhood public school and against education as a profession, public education itself is placed at risk. The strategies now favored by the most powerful forces in the private and public sectors are unlikely to improve American education. Deregulation contributed to the near collapse of our national economy in 2008, and there is no reason to anticipate that it will make education better for most children. Removing public oversight will leave the education of our children to the whim of entrepreneurs and financiers. Nor is it wise to entrust our schools to inexperienced teachers, principals, and superintendents. Education is too important to relinquish to the vagaries of the market and the good intentions of amateurs.

  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?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Lessons Learned

  WE HAVE KNOWN FOR MANY YEARS that we need to improve our schools. We keep stumbling, however, because there is widespread disagreement about what should be improved, what we mean by improvement, and who should do it. A strong case for improvement was made by A Nation at Risk, which warned in 1983 that our students and our schools were not keeping up with their international peers. Since then, many reports and surveys have demonstrated that large numbers of young people leave school knowing little or nothing about history, literature, foreign languages, the arts, geography, civics, or science. The consequences of inadequate education have been recently documented in books such as Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, Rick Shenkman’s Just How Stupid Are We? and Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason. These authors describe in detail the alarming gaps in Americans’ knowledge and understanding of political issues, scientific phenomena, historical events, literary allusions, and almost everything else one needs to know to make sense of the world. Without knowledge and understanding, one tends to become a passive spectator rather than an active participant in the great decisions of our time.