Diane Ravitch Calls It Like It Is

One of the remarkable things about Diane Ravitch is that she has been a staunch advocate from both sides of the great abyss. The fact that she now supports genuine, authentic and principled education gives hope to many of us in the face of the tsunami of testing, "accountability" and political meddling that is at the heart of the dismantling of the system of  education as we know it. Her recent blogpost about the heavy hand of the Federal Government regarding testing in Vermont is both comprehensive and eloquent and serves as a dire warning to anyone interested in the salvation of  our education system as a place where children learn, grow, flourish and blossom as individuals within a caring society.

The impending, inevitable  public outcry of perceived declining standards illustrated in the soon-to-be-released SBAC scores will only serve to highlight the wisdom of Ravitch's words as teachers and the education system are subjected to yet more abuse from an ill-informed public that seizes upon the simple but misguided notion that increasing levels of evaluation will improve the quality of education.

One of my colleagues at SMC, Beth Peterson, quoted Gary Oldfield when responding to Ravitch's blogpost with this brilliant observation " Setting absurd standards and then announcing massive failures has undermined public support for public schools . . . We are dismantling public school systems whose problems are basically the problems of racial and economic polarization, segregation and economic disinvestment.” (Educational Researcher, August/September 2014, p.286).

The SBACS, the tests in English language arts and math, adopted by many States as the  compulsory evaluation tool for the new Common Core State Standards will be an  unmitigated disaster. They are difficult to administer, difficult to take by students, and are scored on the other side of the country in Washington State. Costing around $27 per student they will undoubtedly make someone financially rich and the rest of us who have to suffer them culturally poor.  

Perhaps parents should be asked to take the SBACS to see what their children are being subjected to.

   

Bury NCLB

When you receive public applause from Diane Ravitch you know you must be doing something right. Such is the case with Rebecca Holcomb's letter to parents and caregivers concerning the damage to our education system that continues to be reeked by the No Child Left Behind act. Holcombe, the recently appointed Vermont Education Secretary eloquently and passionately describes how unrealistic it is to expect every student in every school throughout Vermont to score as proficient.

She also highlights how absurd it is that 97 percent of schools failed to make "adequate yearly progress". This would have been 100% if not for the fact that some schools were exempt because they are field testing the SBAC tests, the next travesty to be inflicted upon out schools.

The single-minded, myopic vision of NCLB has created a situation in which so much of what was good about US schools has been sacrificed for the sake of testing a narrow band of material much of which was learned simply to be recalled on a test, just like we did in the 1950s and before.

To label schools as failures has always seemed to me to be one of the nastiest, meanest things you could possibly do to an organization. We would never think of publicly labeling individual children, or even adults for that matter, as failures so why is it acceptable to do this to a whole community.

There are so many other things that schools, especially elementary schools should be free to teach that are not testable with paper and pencil or a keyboard and screen. The science of attention in the field of cognitive neuroscience illustrated by the work of Adele Diamond, for example, is something that many schools are already beginning to embrace  according to a recent PBS program.

A Ray of Hope for Education

In the depression and gloom of the current movement of  the private sector take over of public education there's a ray of hope that has to be developed from its quiet, gentle nucleus into a roaring inferno that will  extinguish the darkness that is enveloping our schools.

That ray of hope, a beacon of light, is embodied in the writings of Diane Ravitch and others with  visions of what education should be. In this particular piece she asks why we have to treat schools like sports teams with leagues containing winners and losers. Race to the Top has done much to engender this analogy by implying the education is a competition in which everyone is racing to get to the top.

The interesting thing about that analog, for that's surely  what it must be, is that it implies so many different ways in which some people are better than others. If it is a race it implies there are winners and losers; that not all people can be at the top. Even if everyone could reach the top it wouldn't be the top anymore because 'top' is a relative position implying that those on top are on top of those below those below. If everyone was on top they couldn't be on top because there would be no-one for them to be on top of.  This makes the whole idea of Race to the Top rediculous.

As Ravitch says ' We must think and act differently. If we do, we will not only have better schools, but a better society, where people help one another instead of finding a way to beat out their competitors".

Now the big question is how can we get the private sector to think in that same collaborative way where individual people come before dollars and the profit margin?