Links for 3/5/10 Diane Ravitch Edition

SAM DILLON

Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education…

These and other experiences left her increasingly disaffected from the choice and accountability movements. Charter schools, she concluded, were proving to be no better on average than regular schools, but in many cities were bleeding resources from the public system. Testing had become not just a way to measure student learning, but an end in itself…

Paul Peterson

“It is in the nature of markets that some succeed, some are middling, and others fail.” That is the primitive, static view of markets proposed by Diane Ravitch in her book-length, passionate diatribe against choice and accountability.

The great economist, Joseph Schumpeter, saw it another way. Markets “creatively” destroy middling performers by giving successful ones room to expand—until they themselves are “creatively” destroyed by still better producers. Because market destruction is creative, economies generally grow rapidly after recessions have taken their toll on the unproductive.
Ignoring basic economic principles, Ravitch asks us to keep intact our hopelessly disabled school system, now stagnant for half a century or more. She thinks she can get American schools to adopt her favored curricular reforms—even though they have refused to do so despite her multi-decade advocacy.

Tyler Cowen

Her bottom line is… “an agenda whose end result is entirely speculative and uncertain. The effort to upend American public education and replace it with something market-based began to feel too radical for me. I concluded that I could not countenance any reforms that might have the effect -- intended or unintended -- of undermining public education.”

Ravitch of course was once the number one advocate of these very ideas…

it is a serious book worth reading and it has some good arguments to establish the view -- as I interpret it -- that both vouchers and school accountability are overrated ideas by their proponents… But are they bad ideas outright? Ravitch doesn't do much to contest the quantitative evidence in their favor…

Is American public education such a huge success these days that it should be immune from significant restructuring? I don't think so…

Andrew Samwick

Once a proponent of school choice and testing, including the way they were supposed to be implemented in the No Child Left Behind Act, she now regards them as threats to our educational systems…

"There should not be an education marketplace, there should not be competition," Ravitch says. "Schools operate fundamentally — or should operate — like families. The fundamental principle by which education proceeds is collaboration…Competition and collaboration are not mutually exclusive. Far from it… But what does not occur in nature or society, because it is not viable over any reasonable length of time, is a strategy of making a "family" out of disparate actors just by placing them near each other…

It is in fact a mistake to think that choice and accountability by themselves will be enough to improve performance, without the other elements of a competitive marketplace…

Unless you break that monopoly, until you do in fact allow direct competition with "the school down the block," you should not expect to be treated to service that is any better than what you typically get as a member of a captive audience…