The Death and Life of the Great American School System

by Diane Ravitch

  With a strong and comprehensive curriculum and a fair assessment and evaluation system in place, the schools must have teachers who are well qualified to teach the curriculum. Teachers must be well educated and know their subjects. To impart a love of learning, they should love learning and love teaching what they know. They should have professional training to learn how to teach what they know, how to manage a classroom, and how to handle the kinds of issues and problems they are likely to encounter as classroom teachers. As in many other aspects of education, we do not have ways to quantify whether a teacher loves learning, but we have some important signposts, such as their education, their command of the subject, and their skill in the classroom. Prospective teachers should be tested on their knowledge of what they will teach, and they should be regularly evaluated by their supervisors and peers.

  To attract and retain the teachers we need, schools must offer compensation that reflects the community’s respect for them as professionals. Many districts are trying various forms of performance pay, and we should watch those experiments closely. Some districts will offer higher salaries to attract teachers in fields where there are chronic shortages, such as science and mathematics. Others may offer bonuses to those who perform extra assignments. Differential pay schemes are in flux and are likely to continue changing for several years, as we learn more from current efforts. But whatever the results may be, no manipulation of salary schedules will suffice to overcome the absence of a sound curriculum, willing students, supportive parents, collegial administrators, and good working conditions.

  If our schools had an excellent curriculum, appropriate assessments, and well-educated teachers, we would be way ahead of where we are now in renewing our school system. But even that would not be enough to make our schools all that they should be. Schools do not exist in isolation. They are part of the larger society. Schooling requires the active participation of many, including students, families, public officials, local organizations, and the larger community.

  As every educator knows, families are children’s first teachers. On the very first day of school, there are wide differences in children’s readiness to learn. Some children have educated parents, some do not. Some come from homes with books, newspapers, magazines, and other reading materials, some do not. Some parents encourage their children to do their schoolwork and set aside a place and a time for them to study, some do not. Some parents take their children to the library, zoo, museum, and other places of learning, while some do not. As a result of different experiences in early childhood, some children begin school with a large vocabulary, while others do not.

  Researchers Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley studied the language development of young children and found a huge disparity between children from impoverished families and children from professional families. Before the age of three, children from the advantaged families had vastly more exposure to words and encouragement than children who grew up in poor households.12 Their study implies the need for early intervention, even before the age of three, as well as intensive adult education for parents.

  Families must do their part to get children ready for school. Families implant basic attitudes and values about learning, as well as the self-discipline and good manners necessary for learning in a group. Families must remain involved with their children, encourage them, monitor their schoolwork, limit the time they spend with electronic devices, meet with their teachers, and see that they have a regular place to study. They must encourage them to take their schooling seriously, respect their teachers, and behave appropriately in school.

  Children from families that provide a literate environment are likely to be more successful in school than children who lack this initial advantage. And what of the children whose families, for whatever reason, are unable to provide support for learning at home? They too must be educated, and schools must go to extra lengths to be sure that they learn the social behaviors and skills that make learning possible. One of the reasons that so-called no-excuses schools, such as KIPP, have achieved good results is that they unabashedly teach the behaviors and attitudes that students need for success in school. Students are taught to sit up straight; dress neatly; look at the teacher; shake hands firmly; make eye contact with the person who is talking; don’t speak out in class unless called upon by the teacher; be nice; work hard. Many parents like the idea that the school will teach these behaviors and attitudes, because they want to protect their children from what they perceive as the chaos of the streets, the destructive behavior of gangs, and the bullying of other students. The no-excuses schools are a response to the weakening of social norms that once supported parents; now even the best efforts of families are often contradicted by what children see on television, in the movies, and in their interactions with peers.

  What is surprising is that the public schools ever stopped expecting children to act with civility in relations with their classmates and teachers. When I was a student in public schools in Houston many years ago, every teacher told the class to sit up straight, speak only when called upon, stop talking out of turn, and listen to your neighbor when he or she was speaking. We were constantly reminded to “be nice” and “work hard,” though in somewhat different language. Those who did not behave appropriately were sent to the principal’s office, not to face corporal punishment (although the big boys did), but to bear the shame and humiliation of having been sent there.

  Schools must enforce standards of civility and teach students to respect themselves and others, or they cannot provide a safe, orderly environment, which is necessary for learning. The regular public schools must learn this lesson from the no-excuses schools and restore the historic tradition of public schools as places where students learn good behavior, good citizenship, and the habits of mind that promote thoughtfulness and learning.

  Our nation’s commitment to provide universal, free public education has been a crucial element in the successful assimilation of millions of immigrants and in the ability of generations of Americans to improve their lives. It is unlikely that the United States would have emerged as a world leader had it left the development of education to the whim and will of the free market. The market has been a wonderful mechanism for the development of small and large business enterprises; it has certainly been far more successful in producing and distributing a wide range of high-quality goods and services than any command-and-control economy. But the market, with its great strengths, is not the appropriate mechanism to supply services that should be distributed equally to people in every neighborhood in every city and town in the nation without regard to their ability to pay or their political power. The market is not the right mechanism to supply police protection or fire protection, nor is it the right mechanism to supply public education.

  To be sure, we must respect and value the diversity made possible by private and religious schools. We should see the coexistence of these different kinds of schools as an ecosystem of educational institutions that has developed over many years and has served our nation well. None seeks to destroy or replace the other, and each serves different populations and sometimes the same populations at different times.

  As a nation, we need a strong and vibrant public education system. As we seek to reform our schools, we must take care to do no harm. In fact, we must take care to make our public schools once again the pride of our nation. Our public education system is a fundamental element of our democratic society. Our public schools have been the pathway to opportunity and a better life for generations of Americans, giving them the tools to fashion their own life and to improve the commonweal. To the extent that we strengthen them, we strengthen our democracy.

  At the present time, public education is in peril. Efforts to reform public education are, ironically, diminishing its quality and endangering its very survival. We must turn our attention to improving the schools, infusing them with the substance of genuine learning and reviving the conditions that make learning possible.

  Notes
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  CHAPTER ONE

  1 Alfred L. Malabre Jr., Lost Prophets: An Insider’s History of the Modern Economists (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1994), 220.

  2 Diane Ravitch, “Tot Sociology: Or What Happened to History in the Grade Schools,” American Scholar 56, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 343-354; Ravitch, “Bring Literature and History Back to Elementary Schools,” in The Schools We Deserve: Reflections on the Educational Crises of Our Time (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 75-79; Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

  3 William Chandler Bagley, Classroom Management: Its Principles and Technique (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 3; William Henry Maxwell, “On a Certain Arrogance in Educational Theorists,” Educational Review 47 (February 1914): 165-182, esp. 165-167, 171.

  4 Diane Ravitch, “Programs, Placebos, Panaceas,” Urban Review, April 1968, 8-11; Ravitch, “Foundations: Playing God in the Ghetto,” Center Forum 3 (May 15, 1969): 24-27.

  5 Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973 (New York: Basic Books, 1974).

  6 Diane Ravitch, The Revisionists Revised: A Critique of the Radical Attack on the Schools (New York: Basic Books, 1978).

  7 Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

  8 Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn Jr., What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 10-11.

  9 History-Social Science Framework for California Public Schools, Kindergarten Through Grade Twelve (Sacramento: California State Department of Education, 1988); see also Diane Ravitch, “Where Have All the Classics Gone? You Won’t Find Them in Primers,” New York Times Book Review, May 17, 1987; Ravitch, “Tot Sociology.”

  10 David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992).

  11 Jason Peckenpaugh, “Reinvention Remembered: A Look Back at Seven Years of Reform,” GovernmentExecutive.com, January 19, 2001, www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0101/011901p1.htm.

  12 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

  13 Sol Stern, “School Choice Isn’t Enough,” City Journal, Winter 2008.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1 The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics had already written mathematics standards.

  2 Lynne V. Cheney, “The End of History,” Wall Street Journal, October 20, 1994.

  3 Karen Diegmueller, “Panel Unveils Standards for U.S. History,” Education Week, November 2, 1994.

  4 Los Angeles Times, “Now a History for the Rest of Us,” October 27, 1994; Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Knopf, 1997).

  5 U.S. Congress, Senate, Congressional Record (January 18, 1995), S1026-S1040.

  6 Diegmueller, “Panel Unveils Standards”; Diane Ravitch, “Standards in U.S. History: An Assessment,” Education Week, December 7, 1994; Ravitch, letter to the editor, New York Times, February 14, 1995.

  7 Diane Ravitch, “Revise, but Don’t Abandon, the History Standards,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 1995.

  8 Bill Clinton and Al Gore, Putting People First: How We Can All Change America (New York: Times Books, 1992), 85-86.

  9 Diane Ravitch, “Social Studies Standards: Time for a Decisive Change,” in Reforming Education in Arkansas: Recommendations from the Koret Task Force, 2005 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Press, 2005), 69-74. The standards cited here are similar to those in most other states.

  10 Diane Ravitch, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (New York: Knopf, 2003), 124-125. For this book, I read the standards in English language arts and history/social studies in every state in the nation.

  11 The law said that the state plans must include challenging academic standards, and that state plans had to win the approval of the U.S. secretary of education. However, by June 2003 every state plan was approved, even though many did not have challenging academic standards. Lynn Olson, “All States Get Federal Nod on Key Plans,” Education Week, June 18, 2003.

  12 Josh Patashnik, “Reform School: The Education (On Education) of Barack Obama,” New Republic, March 26, 2008, 12-13.

  13 David Brooks, “Who Will He Choose?” New York Times, December 5, 2008; Washington Post, “A Job for a Reformer,” December 5, 2008; Chicago Tribune, “Obama and Schoolkids,” December 9, 2008. Republicans recognized that President Obama was embracing some of the GOP’s core beliefs, including school choice, merit pay, and accountability. Richard N. Bond, Bill McInturff, and Alex Bratty, “A Chance to Say Yes: The GOP and Obama Can Agree on School Reform,” Washington Post, August 2, 2009.

  14 Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 228-266.

  15 Edward B. Fiske, “College Entry Test Scores Drop Sharply,” New York Times, September 7, 1975.

  16 College Entrance Examination Board, On Further Examination: Report of the Advisory Panel on the Scholastic Aptitude Test Score Decline (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1977), 26-31.

  17 President’s Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies, Strength Through Wisdom: A Critique of U.S. Capability (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979); National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Education, Science and Engineering Education for the 1980s and Beyond (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1980).

  18 For his perspective on A Nation at Risk, see Terrel H. Bell, The Thirteenth Man: A Reagan Cabinet Memoir (New York: Free Press, 1988), 114-143.

  19 National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983), 5-6.

  20 Ibid., 8.

  21 Ibid., 8-9.

  22 Ibid., 18-22.

  23 Ibid., 24-27.

  24 Ibid., 25.

  25 Ibid., 30.

  26 Ibid., 7.

  27 David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 3-5, 139-140, 184.

  28 See, for example, Richard Rothstein, “‘A Nation at Risk’ Twenty-five Years Later,” Cato Unbound, April 7, 2008, www.cato-unbound.org/2008/04/07/richard-rothstein/a-nation-at-risk-twenty-five-years-later/.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1 Marshall S. Smith and Jennifer O’Day, “Systemic School Reform,” in The Politics of Curriculum and Testing: The 1990 Yearbook of the Politics of Education Association, ed. Susan H. Fuhrman and Betty Malen (London: Falmer, 1991), 233-267. See also Maris A. Vinovskis, “An Analysis of the Concept and Uses of Systemic Educational Reform,” American Educational Research Journal 33, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 53-85.

  2 Diane Ravitch, “National Standards and Curriculum Reform: A View from the Department of Education,” NASSP Bulletin, December 1992.

  3 The Bloomberg administration dissolved the administrative structures of the community school districts after the mayor won control of the public schools in 2002. The district lines remained on paper, but the districts were no longer functioning administrative entities.

  4 Joyce Purnick, “Alvarado Resigns as Schools Chief, Offering Apology,” New York Times, May 12, 1984. See also Paul Teske et al., “Public School Choice: A Status Report,” in City Schools: Lessons from New York, ed. Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 313-338.

  5 Kenneth Goodman, What’s Whole in Whole Language? (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986), 25, 37-38.

  6 Jeanne S. Chall, Learning to Read: The Great Debate (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). See also Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 353-361, 443-448.

  7 National Academy of Ed
ucation, Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1985), 37.

  8 See Catherine E. Snow, M. Susan Burns, and Peg Griffin, eds., Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1998); National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2000); G. Reid Lyon and Louisa C. Moats, “Critical Conceptual and Methodological Considerations in Reading Intervention Research,” Journal of Learning Disabilities 30, no. 6 (November- December 1997): 578-588; Louisa C. Moats, Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science (Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Teachers, 1999).