Jorge Werthein

Diane Ravitch, historiadora de NYU, presentó su libro la semana pasada que explica su crisis intelectual y cambio de opinión en las mayoría de sus posturas sobre política educativa (accountability, estandares, school choice, charter schools, vouchers, etc.) en un evento en American Enterprise Institute (AEI) en Washington DC. Mark Schneider, cientista político de AIR y AEI y ex-Comissioner del National Center for Education Statistics, fue el comentarista. Adjunto sus comentarios que son bastante críticos y entretenidos. Gregory Mark Schneider Comments on Diane Ravitch: The Death and Life of the Great American School System Diane is arguably the best educational historian working today and one of the best the nation has ever produced. She is also a sharp critic: I found myself cringing at Diane's analysis of how so many programs I thought were reasonably good have gone astray. Of course it's not only programs that get skewered, the behavior of some very prominent reformers and researchers also come under close scrutiny. Chapter after chapter she confirms what we all know about education policy and practice---it is relentlessly based on fads built on the flimsiest of evidence. Diane shows that good ideas are often taken to scale without any thought about how any of reforms might work in a larger venue. Even worse, as Diane shows in case after case, ideas often become invested with magic properties so that people see them as a silver bullet that will cure all our ills. And of course Diane is a great writer, so the book goes down easy and there is a compelling personal odyssey in here that makes the book a great read. I'm not sure if it was Diane's intent, the book depressed the hell out of me. But -- and, of course, there was going to be a but---after going through the book and finding myself in a funk, I picked myself up and reread the book---and ultimately came away disappointed. ** I always viewed Diane as a hard-headed sharp analyst. But I didn't know that she was also a hopeless romantic and I think that her romantic vision of what schools were and where they should be just doesn't work with the reality of the world we live in. As Nelson Smith from the National Alliance for Charter Schools described it to me: much of this book is like looking through a rose colored rearview mirror. Why do I say Diane's vision of what we want from our schools is romantic: From Page 230: "Certainly we want our students to be able to read and write and be numerate. Those are the basic skills on which all other learning builds. But that is not enough. We want to prepare them for a useful life. We want them to be able to think for themselves when they are in the world on their own. We want them to have good character and to make sound decisions, about their life, their work, and their health. We want them to face life's joys and travails with courage and humor. We hope that they will be kind and compassionate in their dealings with others. We want them to have a sense of justice and fairness." The list expands to include an appreciation arts, music, and science, to be multicultural, to be great citizens, and so on and so on. From the picture on the cover, I suppose all this great stuff is supposed to happen in a broken down one room school house in the middle of a prairie, where every teacher is a Mrs. Ratliff, Diane's high school English teacher, who stars in chapter 9. In Diane's vision if we can't have a one room school house in the middle of the prairie we should strive for a neighborhood school that is a beautiful, well maintained facility that is amply resourced. This is an idealized version of what education might have been in a simpler time gone by. · A time when there were lots of Mrs. Ratliff's because women had no other alternative occupations, · a time when neighborhoods may have really been more cohesive and safe, and · a time when public schools may have actually delivered a broader education that prepared people for work and society. But in today's world, there may be more teachers in rubber rooms in NYC than there are Mrs. Ratliffs, there are neighborhood schools that fail to impart even the most basic knowledge to their students year after year after year, and it's a world where only 3% of Detroit's fourth grade students are proficient in math according to the latest NAEP results. Again, let me say how much I liked parts of the book but let me delve into a couple of her arguments in more detail---places where I think she got things wrong. A key theme throughout the book is the importance of a broad liberal arts curriculum. This shows up in many chapters and in many contexts. Of course, her call for such a curriculum matches her notion of what we should want from our schools. I have at least two problems with her argument. The first is factual---I'm not sure how much the curriculum has actually narrowed---something she charges happened under NCLB and is antithetical to her vision of what schools should be doing. There is some evidence at the elementary level that there has been an emphasis on math and reading, driven no doubt in part by the testing requirements of NCLB, but I don't think we really know the actual extent to which the curriculum narrowed. I also think that the real problem is not narrowing of the curriculum but that in order to get what we want and need from our schools, the agrarian model of the school day and the school year has to go---180 days, 6 hours a day is simply not enough time to fit in all that needs to be done. One of the things we do know---and it's not a fad or a magic bullet---time on task matters. And if we persist with a short school day and a short school year, we are simply never going to get schools that produce the students and citizens that the nation needs. While the evidence on the K-8 world is not all that good regarding the narrowing of the curriculum, the evidence from the high school world is clearly opposite of this supposed narrowing. As well documented in NAEP high school transcript studies, students are taking more credits than ever before and they are taking more rigorous sounding courses than ever before. This leads me to the second question: if schools have focused so single mindedly on math and reading in the last 8 years, why have the results on NAEP, PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS, been so lackluster. Something doesn't compute. And if high school students are taking more social studies, which they are, and taking more world history, which they are, and more geography, which they are, and more arts---again, have we seen how a broader curriculum have increased the abilities and talents of our recent graduates? Something more than a narrow curriculum is at play and that has to do with the poor job that far too many schools are doing with the students they have and the quality of the teacher workforce. Saying that schools should have a broad liberal arts curriculum does nothing to address those problems. A second area that I want to comment on is Diane's analysis of choice, particularly charter schools. Diane exults neighborhood schools. From page 113: "when I was a child in Houston in the 1940s and 1950s, everyone I knew went to the neighborhood public school. Every child on my block and in my neighborhood went to the same elementary school, the same junior high school, and the same high school. We car-pooled together, we cheered for the same teams; we went to the same after school events." I'll swap anecdotes about neighborhood schools to present an alternate reality to the idealized vision of Houston public schools in the 1950s. Both my daughters went to neighborhood schools in suburban Long Island in the 1970s. The schools were well funded---per pupil expenditures were always in the top five school districts in the state, the facilities were good, there was one elementary school, one middle school, and one high school, so kids cheered the same teams, went to the same concerts, etc. Every morning, I waited with other parents to send my kids off to school on the school bus and that created neighborhood cohesion and built friendships and social capital. My daughters even had their own Mrs. Ratliff---who like Diane's Mrs. Ratliff taught them English in their senior year. By the way, I always wondered why they had to wait until the very end of their school careers to get such an incredible teacher and why so many of their teachers were so clearly mediocre. More tellingly every morning when I sent them off to school, my prayer was "please don't ruin the love for learning that these young kids have." And mind you this is in one of the best funded school districts in the nation! For three years I taught in a neighborhood middle school in New York City. My prayers during those years was rather different and even more pessimistic than the prayer I had for my children---during those years, my prayer was "please get me through this day in one piece." Yes, it would be wonderful if neighborhood schools were what Diane wants them to be, but they aren't. If they were what she wanted, then I understand her antipathy toward charter schools, but far too many traditional public schools are failure factories. Let me turn to in more detail to the issue of choice and charter schools: Diane's analysis of charter schools is at the tail end of an analysis of the evolution of choice---hitting the usual notes, Milton Friedman, Chubb and Moe, vouchers---and then the displacement of vouchers by charter schools as the preferred vehicle of reform for choice advocates. She begins by reviewing the empirical evidence concerning the learning gains among voucher students and finds that there were few cases where the gains of voucher students were greater than students who were offered but did not accept vouchers. This is taken as an indicator of failure---but Milton Friedman actually argued that voucher schools could either produce higher outcomes at the same price or the same outcomes for a lower price. Since vouchers, for example, in DC carry a price tag that is about half of what traditional students get, the second condition of Friedman's hypothesis is actually met---that is students are doing as well for far less money. Incidentally, the same thing is true of charter schools, which as Diane notes produce pretty much the same results as traditional public schools---but charters are funded at around less than 90% of the traditional public schools, so from Friedman's second perspective they are doing better. Vouchers as she rightfully notes have hit a dead end and charter schools have taken their place as the preferred mechanism for using choice as a mechanism for reform. Diane's take on charter schools is pretty negative---and much of her criticism has to do with creaming. She writes: "Regular public schools are at a huge disadvantage...because charter schools may attract the most motivated students, may discharge laggards, and may enforce a tough disciplinary code, but also because the charters often get additional financial resources from their corporate sponsors" This is an interesting argument---but where does it leads us? On one hand it is hard to prove. As others have noted on observed measures, like race, ethnicity, free lunch, ELL, special education, there are few if any systematic differences between charters and traditional public schools. There may other types of parent/student differences, such as motivational issues, that distinguish charter school parents from traditional public school ones, but first I'm not sure how we can really measure them---they are called "non-observables" for a reason. Let's set aside the measurement issue and focus on some implications of Diane's argument. Diane worries that the success of charter schools will draw off the most motivated students and parents and create havens for good students, who attend schools for longer hours and more days, who have dedicated teachers, and excellent curriculum, outstanding teachers and a culture that emphasizes hard work. And as these schools succeed the public schools will fail, because they will collect the students with less motivation---but if we took the kids in charter schools and distributed them back into traditional neighborhood schools would the performance of students in those schools really go up? As a specific example, if we closed the Thurgood Marshall Academy in DC and sent those 400 students back to the neighborhood high school, what would be the outcome? We would most likely lose most of those 400 students, who are now on the track to college. Is that a good tradeoff? Diane also notes the differences between "No-excuse schools" like KIPP that emphasize proper behavior and the attitudes needed for success. She notes that far too many public schools stopped* *expecting civility and proper behavior. But that difference helps explain why parents choose charter schools: they are looking for small, safe schools, that often emphasize basics and accept no excuses. In short, don't many of the charter schools come closer in aspiration and often in practice to the image that Diane has of what defines functioning school? And more importantly, if we close down all the charter schools and wait for neighborhood public schools to improve, who pays the costs? Middle class parents will move to the suburbs or send their kids to private schools, leaving the burden of bad schools to fall on the usual less affluent victims. *Conclusion* While I have emphasized my disagreements with the book, let me return to the positives. The book tells a depressingly familiar story of a field wracked by fads and innovations that have gone off the track. While I disagree with some of the analysis, overall her diagnosis of where we've gone wrong is often nothing short of brilliant---although as noted above, there are big places where I believe she got things wrong. But more fundamentally, I can't make the leap that Diane makes---the disconnect between the diagnosis her concluding "Lessons Learned" chapter is too far for me to go. I, like so many people in this room, have good friends who actually do the incredibly hard work of teaching or running schools. They face real problems day after day after day. They are looking for help, for a way forward. Can we in good conscience say "look to the little school on the prairie" or "a shining neighborhood school on the hill" and all will be good? I don't think so. -- -- Gregory Elacqua -- Sub-director Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación Universidad Diego Portales 56-2-676-8535 www.cpce.cl