Focus on Education: Diane Ravitch

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I have no right to address this issue, because I’m reacting to a report of a book by Diane Ravitch (see here for a brief bio, and a summary of her latest ideas)  that I have not read. This author seems to be saying most of the things that I have tried to say, and has said them better, and has more information with which to support her points. Rather than state that she has said these things, (which she may have), I’m saying them for myself.

The furious testing that goes on is misguided. I’m not at all against tests; I think they allow students to know how good they are. But that’s all they should do; they should not be used for anything else. They should certainly not be used to assess teaching. It is unfortunate that there are no better ways to tell whether a teacher is doing his or her job than to assess his or her students —and in the fee-for-service atmosphere that we find at the present time, there doesn’t seem to be an alternative—there is nothing that can be done, as far as I can see. If tests are going to be administered, someone is sure to use them in a way that they find convenient. All over the world, it seems that tests are poisoning the water of education, and as tests become increasingly indispensable for establishing the value of people, other abuses inevitably come into play: private tutoring, available only to those that can afford it, and, I’m sure, someday corruption and bribery will not be far behind.
Teaching is a profession that seems to destroy those who take it up. The social climate is such that so much hangs on the outcome of education that everyone looks for a scapegoat, and the teacher is a natural one. Don’t be too surprised if very soon only the scum of the earth will take up teaching. No amount of marketing or PR will serve to persuade any but the most gullible into the trap of taking up teaching. You truly have to be naïve to want to submit to the humiliation of being a teacher in the United States of America, the land of the brave, and the home of the constant testing!

The effectively privatizing of education, towards which the US is being pushed, by commercial interests, obviously, will inevitably create economic stratification of education as much as there is stratification in other aspects of society. While society rebelled against racial segregation in the sixties, today segregation of all sorts is being encouraged by the conservative elements among us, and the very people who are aghast at the increase in the use of Spanish across America, and at the access that the underprivileged have for all sorts of goods and services, will prefer to have their children educated in an environment free of what are probably perceived as the marginal elements of society. The rush to embrace Charter Schools, Diane Ravitch seems to say, is just the desire to have minority-free classrooms in disguise. Even if such a motive is furthest from your mind, be careful: to have poverty and diversity hidden from your child’s eyes is not the best thing for your child.

I had forgotten what a broadening thing it was, to have a college education. Those of us who have had the privilege of schooling beyond the twelfth grade sometimes forget how different the world is as we see it, from how it must seem to those who only learn about the world outside through the distorting lens of the Evening News, or worse, Fox News. Or through telescopes from their bedrooms.  Some of the inexplicable attitudes of people like the former governor of Alaska become a little more understandable. The attitudes of conservative members of Congress who have actually had an education are truly inexplicable.

The main job of a teacher, as I see it, is to teach the student to understand and love the world, all of it, all that it has been, and all that it is now, and to delight in how things work (when they do work). But that will not happen, because it isn’t profitable.

I was recently made aware of several books that had titles something like: How Science Poisons Everything, in opposition to another book that said something like: God Isn’t So Great. It’s time someone wrote a book titled How Business Poisons Everything, or How the Profit Motive Destroys Everything We Hold Dear, Including Education, Society, Our Homes, Our Children, Our Government, And World Peace. So There.

[Added later]

AND ANOTHER THING.
We’re told that Diane Ravitch has come out against not only No Child Left Behind, but also Obama’s program and slogan: Race to the Top.  If you read Ms Ravitch’s bio, you learn that she was educated at Wellesley, an excellent, very selective East Coast college (no criticism there; I live on the East Coast myself) which was, until a few decades ago, a women-only institution.  If we go on the assumption that her elitist education had an impact on her thinking, we might begin to understand why she first supported clumsy initiatives like No Child Left Behind, and then abandoned them.

Any idealist who has received a good education knows that there is an amazing amount of things out there that would be even more amazing if people weren’t so dumb.  And certainly, ignorance is the greater part of dumbness.  So it isn’t surprising that anyone with any sort of heart who’s been to college wants to set out to change the world; and plans brimming with energy, like No Child Left Behind, promise to be almost the only thing that’s going to make any sort of difference in the monolithic monument to stupidity that US schools appear to be, from the outside.

The inside, too.  Except for a few cracks here and there, and a little intelligent erosion around the edges —and let us be grateful to the intelligent termites who have kept working at the pile of petrified crap for so long— the monument survives.

There is some suspicion that politicians in office are sort of divided on the issue of education.  It seems obvious that cynically, an ignorant electorate is to be desired, because they will believe anything.  But it is not easy to pile lies upon lies, because lies are harder to defend than the truth, and so there is something to be said for an intelligent, educated, well-informed electorate, which is able to knowledgeably judge what the issues are, and judge how well you have addressed them.  When it comes to competing with foreign technology, though, we have two options: import educated labor, or educate our own.  Neither option is easy, with folks being as lazy, and as hostile to all things non-American as they are!

It is not that the rest of us want our youth to remain ignorant.  It is just that the American approach had become: leave it to the professionals.  If they don’t fix it, sue them.  We forget that we can’t do that in every case, but we continue to do that, because it is the lazy thing to do.  I don’t know what Ms Ravitch advocates; there is no simple fix.  The road to good education is long, and it takes first raising a generation of young people who value education for its own sake, who must grow up to become teachers who value teaching because of their love of children and their hate of ignorance, and their faith in a better world, and become parents who are actually interested in what their kids are learning each day, and know the constraints under which their friends, the teachers, work.

I know.  I know.  It’ll never work.  Perhaps something like No Child Left Behind might be easier. . . every decade or so . . .

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