The Death and Life of the Great American School System


Diane Ravitch. The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. New York: Basic Books, 2010.

As reviewed by Ted Odenwald

teddeathschools2 Diane Ravitch, a highly respected historian of education, has written an impassioned plea for sanity in the area of education reform. Ravitch, a noted researcher at NYU and the Brookings Institute, and a former education advisor to the G.W. H. Bush and Clinton administrations, was always a supporter of reforms within the country’s school systems; she advocated testing, establishing national standards, and creating charter schools to aid students who could not be helped by the traditional schools. But the slant of her contentions is quite different now. She feels that a number of reform movements have become distortions of the original objectives and are now threatening the very existence of our school systems.
Standardized testing, rather than being the tool for providing guidance for educators by identifying areas of student strengths and weakness, has become a destructive weapon in the hands of those looking to punish teachers; the tests have become instruments of intimidation leading teachers to focus on teaching methods of test-taking rather than on productive curricula and diminishing concentrations in the humanities, arts, and sciences; testing has been a source of fraudulent data, manipulated to give the appearance of improvement, when in fact, no such thing had occurred. Demands of “No Child Left Behind” have led states to lower the bar of acceptable performance on statewide tests to hide the fact that “unacceptable” percentages of students have failed to improve.
Ravitch claims that charter schools have become rivals of the traditional public schools, competing for the top performing students. This, she claims, was never the intention of the charter schools; their purpose was to complement the traditional schools by providing alternative educations for students who could not function in the regular classroom. By drawing off top-performing pupils, the charter schools were basically insuring that testing averages in the traditional schools would fall—and falling scores denote “school failure” in the eyes of state and federal authorities. And when the public schools failed to show improvement on the standardized tests, states would often remove the administrators, substitute political appointees, and sometimes even close schools, shipping students away from their neighborhood school.  Ravitch claims that, ironically,  there is no evidence that the students of these charter schools have outperformed their public school peers.
Educational foundations and government-controlled schools systems are also endangering the American school system. The former, funded by the “Billionaire Boys Club,” are basically aiming at setting up charter schools—based on the values and backgrounds of very rich people who do not have the expertise to develop challenging curricula. The government-controlled schools are mainly found in big cities. Test scores,  graduation rates, and student attendance rates all become the basic criteria for a school’s rating, for measurement of administrators’ and teachers’ professional competence, and even for determination of whether the school should be allowed to continue functioning.
I recommend that readers begin with chapter 11, “Lessons Learned,” as it summarizes Ravitch’s arguments against each of the unsuccessful “remedies” and presents her own recommendations based on her research. She advocates keeping education in the hands of trained educators instead of politicians or businessmen; she recommends using standardized testing as a tool for measuring a district’s status—but never as a punitive instrument against educators, nor as an instrument that would become the focus of teaching; she recommends a nation-wide curriculum that would insure that all teachers of each grade could be on the same page; she recommends that charter schools be used to fulfill their original purposes, not as competitive institutions, but as a complementary force  to assist pupils unable to  function in the public schools. She recommends fair observation-based evaluations of teachers, as opposed to judgments based upon students’ standardized test performance. The reader who is interested in the background of these recommendations can backtrack through the respective chapters to see how Ravitch arrived at each of  her conclusions.

tedTed Odenwald and his wife, Shirley have lived in Oakland for 40 years. He taught HS English at Glen Rock High School for all of those years plus one more. Now he is enjoying time spent with his family, singing in the North Jersey Chorus and quenching his wanderlust. Ted is also the Worship Leader at the Ramapo Valley Baptist Church in Oakland.