Diane Ravitch's new book

Diane Ravitch has written a new book: The Death and Life of the Great American School System. She believes in teaching content, not just focusing on the style of teaching and encouraging student freedom (this has caused her to be labeled illiberal or conservative by education academics in the past), and she used to think that testing and charter schools were a good way to achieve these goals. Therefore, she supported the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. Now she’s against NCLB and related, recent developments because charter schools are proven to be unsuccessful, insufficiently accountable or unaccountable, and likely to be taken over by corporate interests; and testing has generated fraud – state-specific standards for tests and state-administered tests have generated evidence of students’ test scores rising under NCLB, but national tests have not shown evidence of improvement under NCLB. Rather, national tests have shown that greater improvement in student achievement was happening before NCLB was put in place. Also, there has been an unconstructive focus, in Ravitch’s view, on demonizing teacher unions and finding “who to punish” (which schools to shut down, how many schools to shut down, which teachers and administrators to fire, etc.); and there has been insufficient emphasis on areas other than the "basic skills" of reading and math. We need to focus attention also on science, the arts, and the humanities including literature. Ravitch also observes with disapproval that hugely wealthy foundations like the Gates (Microsoft) and Waltons' (Wal-Mart) foundations are highly influential in directing education policy; these foundations support charter schools, the privatization of education, and the current emphasis on skills testing.

I believe that a solution must include greater respect for, and influence of, the leadership of teachers and the teaching profession in decision-making; and higher-quality and well-paid teaching in currently underfunded school districts. The corporate sphere and corporation-spawned foundations have too much influence in education. Needed change cannot happen unless educators increasingly regard themselves, and conduct themselves, as grown-up human beings and competent professionals, departing from habits of embracing ultimately disempowering roles of helpless-infantile-victims-who-must-be-rescued-by-someone-else. Emotional investment in childish, fairy-tale rescue narratives in which educators consciously or subconsciously fancy themselves as princesses-waiting-for-the-rescuing-hero, and the self-disempowerment and self-infantilization that are involved in such an emotional orientation, are bad for education. Nobody else is going to swoop in and solve all our problems (especially not people from the corporate sphere). We educators, ourselves, are the ones we have been waiting for.