Some years ago Diane Ravitch wrote LEFT BACK which is a minor masterpiece; years from now historians will recommend one book to understand the background of American public education and it will be LEFT BACK. With her new book, THE DEATH AND LIFE of the AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM, Diane Ravitch has once again proven that she is the Grand Dame of the history of American education and once again has produced what must be classed as a permanent book a book scholars will turn to years from now as a standard sourcebook for American public education's virtues and vices.
Diane has always been a supporter of standards; as a public school teacher so am I. But Diane makes a powerful case that our scientism of day -which mistakenly believes schools can be judged or measured by such narrow instruments as scantron/edusoft bubble tests-is NOT an accurate measure of educational effectiveness.
Ravitch is also not afraid to state the obvious: the temptation for schools, teachers and administrators to game the system or cheat is sometimes overwhelming. Even honest administrators would be foolish not to drop students who never show up for class. The reason why is because NCLB hits schools for low participation points and students who don't show up count as a ZERO for school averages.
AYP's tell us something but they are not a valid barometer of true academic achievement. One would think that if a high school had 300 AP scholars a year that would count for something but it does not. But the reality that those 300 AP scholars are not merely proficient but far, far above state standards (ten times as much twenty times as much?). On the AYP's AP students are counted as just competent students. That would be like rating the US military but not counting the Special Forces or Marines. It is idiotic. Much of NCLB is idiotic and Ravitch proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
As a classroom teacher I know that teacher evaluations based on performance of standardized tests are notoriously biased. When I had all AP classes I was a genius and the "Jaime Escalante" of Bakersfield. The truth is even Jaime Escalante was not Jaime Escalante when he was challenged by a different school body with different problems and different cultural backgrounds than Mr. Escalante was accustomed to. And similarly, now that I have no AP students my test scores are no longer so stellar. The reality is the friends of the principal or departments chairs make sure to assign themselves the best classes so that THEIR teaching may not be called into question.
I am not afraid of having the lowest performing students however. I consider them a challenge and I consider it my duty to try to give these students the best quality education I can. But I am not a miracle worker. If my juniors are unable to read a single sentence of English how are they -in one year or two years- pass their proficiencies and complete the curriculum for college prep students in social studies? My job (as I see it) is to give these students an introduction to history, study skills and the reading of English. My theory is that the students must learn how to learn to read English first. If they can't do that then they cannot hope to engage the English medium curriculum. No one would expect first year American students of Spanish or French to score as well as high school students in France, Spain or Costa Rica so why should we expect immigrant students -often from the poorest and most disadvantaged classes- to read, write and score "ABOVE BASIC" , "PROFICIENT" or “ADVANCED on their standardized tests?
This writer remembers when Diane Ravitch was flirting with “voucherism” as a solution to low performing schools; but Ravitch examines the facts dispassionately and says "in sum, twenty years of vouchers in Milwaukee and a decade of the program's expansion to include religious school, there was no evidence of dramatic improvement for the neediest students or the public schools they left behind." Ravitch is exactly right that non-educators -often with no classroom experience- are simply not qualified to reform schools let alone run them.
Ravitch is blunt she says NCLB is wrong headed and "a timetable for the demolition of public education in the United States." Ravitch proves that Charter schools are no panacea. Ravitch proves that small schools (as touted by Bill Gates) are no solution. One thing she doesn't mention is that reforms like smaller schools and block schedules undermine and virtually destroy Advanced Placement programs because there are not the resources, students or teachers to sustain these programs. So in trying to improve a school we often dynamite the highest achieving classes. That makes no sense.
I am not irrevocably opposed to Charter schools or Catholic schools. In fact I spent much of my professional career teaching in Catholic schools or private education; at present I am still involved in tutoring “home schoolers” in subject areas their parents are unable to give them (such as Spanish and Latin). But like Ravitch I know that Charters ("school choice") by themselves are no answer to our societal and educational problem. And Ravitch documents the incompetence, theft and corruption associated with Charter schools such as The California Charter Academy which declared bankruptcy in 2004 stranding over 6000 students in more than 60 "storefront" schools. The founder of the organization -not an educator but a former insurance salesman- may have taken the State of California for over $100,000,000. That is no way to run a navy.
And by the way, does anyone think a nation can be defended by a citizen militia with private gunboats to protect the coast? Of course, not! No modern nation could defend itself on that basis. As Ron Unz noted many years ago not a single modern nation has dared to abandon universal public education. The USA would be very unwise if it were to abandon universal free public education.
Ravitch pulls no punches but is not a pessimistic doomsayer. She writes "If we want to improve education, we must first have a vision of what good education is. We should have goals that are worth striving for." Ravitch is right that our students need basic skills in literacy and numeracy but then says, wisely, "but that is not enough." Ravitch writes:
We want to prepare them for a useful life.
We want them to be able to think for themselves when they are out in the world on their own.
We want them to have a 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.
We want them to understand our nation and our world and the challenges we face.
We want them to be active, responsible citizens, and to reach decisions rationally. We want them to learn science and mathematics so they understand the problems of modern live and participate in finding solutions. We want them to enjoy the rich artistic and culture heritage of our society and other societies.
I may be mistaken but here I sense the influence of two other great teachers of the 20th century: NYU worthy Sidney Hook and another great Columbian like Dr. Ravitch, and one of the finest teachers and authors of the 20th century, Gilbert Highet. Hook, Sidney. (SEE "The Closing of the American Mind: An Intellectual Best-Seller Revisited." The. American Scholar 58 (1989): pp. 123-35.)
.
And I may be mistaken again but I sense at least indirectly the influence of Catholic educators on Ms. Ravitch because when she speaks like this she sounds like Sister Rosemary of Holy Names Academy (Seattle) one of the hardest work and most inspiring teachers I ever had the privilege to work with. But this just goes to show you how catholic (small c) the intellectual influences have been on Diane Ravitch. Diane is always thinking, always revising, always researching and always exploring. She may have visited more schools and interviewed and corresponded with more teachers from more states and more countries than anybody alive. Ravitch is not parochial at all and she is right when she notes that countries like Finland and Japan have excellent public systems without rewards or sanctions of any kind. Ravitch notes "their students excel at tested subjects because they are well educated in many other subjects that teach them to use language well and to wrestle with important ideas.”
Ravitch is also right that our very expensive text books are, for the most part, veritable quaking bogs of boredom and ennui or as she put it in THE LANGUAGE POLICE sanitized PC tomes that create "the Empire of Boredom." Ravitch notes such PC textbooks "maintain a studied air of neutrality, thus ensuring the triumph of dullness.
In fact, I feel it is my primary job as a classroom teacher to enliven the curriculum with humorous anecdotes and great stories. It never ceases to amaze me how students pick up things in classroom discussion such as Butch O'Hare's notorious father (an associate of Al Capone) , why German machine guns had three times the rate of fire of the best Allied machine guns, why Hitler's V-2 rocket program may have ensured Hitler's defeat, why Puerto Rico produces zero illegal aliens (due to the Jones Act of 1917), how the Polish Air Force smuggled out a Nazi Enigma machine to England and help win the Battle of the Atlantic, how Lesley Howard may have helped kept Spain neutral and so became a target of assassination by the Nazis- the story of Earl Warren's immigrant wife and parents (none of whom were native English-speakers), how Martin Luther King survived TWO assassination attempts prior to 1968, the fact 80 or 90 year old women could be wet nurses to babies- this was once very common place in the Highlands and Islands- , stories of Cubans working in the Gran Zafra (sugar cane harvest), how primitive medicine was even as late as 1915 -no blood transfusions or antibiotics- Tiger tanks shooting duds because the shells had been sabotaged by slave laborers, Jacqueline Kennedy's famous pink dress at Dallas, Mrs. Kennedy giving speeches in fluent French and Spanish, John F. Kennedy using Latin and German in his Berlin speech, how Roosevelt helped establish the March of Dimes, and the story of the Candy Bombers during the Berlin Airlift. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction and it is these very human stories and curious anecdotes that help make history come alive.
And I might add that public schools are not the only places where safe mediocrity reigns; most books on required reading lists in Teacher Ed programs were unknown 50 years ago and I dare say will be unknown 50 years from now. What a colossal waste of paper, time and resources! As a case in point a good argument could be made that one could learn more about the Cold War, politics and totalitarianism by reading and studying in depth three pieces of literature than every text book every written: the candidates would be Animal Farm by Orwell, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway, Dr. Zhivago by Pasternak or perhaps the First Circle by Solzhenitsyn. I know from experience that young peoples eyes light up when they read great literature filled with humor and insights.
Ravitch is absolutely right that curriculum, good curriculum is absolutely the sine qua non. She writes " It is a road map. Without a road map, you are sure to drive in circles and get nowhere...a sound curriculum ensures that young people will not remain ignorant of the most essential facts and ideas of the humanities and sciences."
Ravitch also has been made aware by her school visits and her many contacts with classroom teachers "in the trenches" how student behavior and civility has, essentially, collapsed. Teachers today hear more curse words and see more violence that any Marine recruit ever heard or witnessed in Camp Pendleton or Parris Island 30 years ago. Teachers are taxed to the breaking point by the constant challenge to their authority and disruptions to the learning process. It is a wonder more teachers don't break and attack their students. The fact is many teachers soldier on heroically resorting to mental health counseling and if things become unbearable they die or resign. I don't know of any teacher who gets combat pay or disability but they should. Just the other day a teacher had to take a loaded gun away from an intruder and it did not even make a line in the local paper. Ravitch is right on the mark when she says "schools must enforce standards of civility and teach student to respect themselves and others, or they cannot provide a safe, orderly environment which is necessary for learning."
Ravitch’s book is not a series of unsupported assertions by any means. Every chapter is very convincingly documented. My favorite chapter, as a school teacher, is chapter 9 "What would Mrs. Ratliff do?" Nobody knows Mrs. Ratliff but Ravitch makes it clear that Mrs. Ratliff was an unsung front line heroine of American civilization and education. American owes more to the Mrs. Ratliffs than most of its presidents past and present (if we are honest most were mediocre plodders or worse complete incompetents with a few glorious exceptions).
Who was Mrs.Ruby Ratliff ? She was none other than the mentor and homeroom teacher of Diane Ravitch herself. I found Ravitch's homage to her former teacher moving. Most teachers labor on in genteel poverty and rarely get any recognition but the teacher's reward is the gratitude of his or her many students. That is what makes it all worthwhile because one does not teach just for fun or for oneself but for the community and in a larger sense for one's civilization. Gilbert Highet once said that a teacher must know and love his subject and Ravitch emphasizes that Mrs. Ratliff loved her subject: the English language and its literature. Mrs. Ratliff had high standards and no doubt spent many hours after school and at home correcting essays, exams and reports. And Ravitch notes that Mrs. Ratliff did it all without once ever recurring to standardized multiple choice tests. That Ravitch does not say so I have a hunch she agrees with this classroom teacher that excessive use of standardized tests is like excessive consumption of junk food; in excess it is sheer poison.
One of the chief faults of American teachers and American education may be excessive overreliance on machine graded superficial bubble multiple guess tests which I may add are exceedingly easy to cheat on or fake. I am quite sure Mrs. Ratliff was never fooled by plagiarism or cheating and by her hands on familiarity with her students work easily spotted the `"rats" and "cheats".
If one seeks a `magic bullet' to cure our educational ills or as Ravitch humorously alludes to a "magic feather" a la Dumbo you will not find it here. Ravitch says "in education, there are no short cuts, no utopias, no silver bullets. For certain, there are no magic feathers that enable elephants to fly.
Truly, as Euclid reportedly said to King Ptolemy, “there is no Royal Road to Geometry." He or she who wants to learn mathematics, solve equations, writing clear prose and gain wisdom must toil and sweat for days, months and years on end. Ravitch is also right that the survival and success of our free society may depend on our public school system. If the public school system is allowed to wither away we may become more like Latin America (which has excellent private schools for the rich and non-existent or woefully inadequate public education for the many who are poor).
This way lies more than madness or bad policy.
This way lies social strife and class warfare to an extent that the independence, prosperity and unity of our Republic may be at risk.
Ravitch writes "it is unlikely that the United States would have emerged as a world leader had it left the development of education to the whim and will of the free market." In my opinion, she never wrote a truer line.
Education is neither about profit and loss nor merely about narrow utilitarian goals. America by its very nature has tended to be utilitarian and materialist for better or for worst. Success in America has always been measured by the accumulation of power, money, status, prestige, property and fame. In addition, Americans have always valued the new over the tried and true disregarding most traditions, -this is their philistine side - which when it comes to culture is often a mistake. The Greeks had a word for this “apeirokalia” (a lack of experience in things beautiful) and yet another which we could translate as `unculture' or "apaideusia" (ignorance of the greatest goods in life)..
Yet I would argue that the most enduring aspect of the American Dream is not these manifestations of pomp, prosperity and power-these things like the Almighty Dollar -presently quite anemic- our naval and air supremacy will pass away- but not the single most valuable we thing we have which is our free and splendid ancient heritage.
What are we to do? We must look firmly towards the future but must never forget the past -that is to say our splendid and free ancient heritage. Above all we must not throw in the towel. We must teach every man, woman and child to wish for liberty, to cherish liberty, to understand liberty and most importantly to be capable of it.
I always tell my students there are there are TWO educations:
The first education is the practical one we all need that teaches us what we need to make a living -most of us have to make a living.
The second education we need is the other education, the "true education" that which teaches us how to live our lives more fully by teaching us to think AND to appreciate `the Good Life". I can't imagine my life without the second education and I encourage my students to cultivate their private lives for their own benefit, happiness and enjoyment and for the unity and mental health of their families.
And we must have the humility and foresight to recognize a people without wisdom -without a strong culture- without a strong memory and strong values without strong schools- will come to ruin.
As we pass the torch to a new generation we are most fortunate to have the lantern of Ravitch's wisdom and learning to help us see a better way. With The Death and Life of the Great American School System Diane Ravitch has raised a monument more enduring than brass -to paraphrase Horace: Non omnis morieris.
Some years ago Diane Ravitch wrote LEFT BACK which is a minor masterpiece; years from now historians will recommend one book to understand the background of American public education and it will be LEFT BACK. With her new book, THE DEATH AND LIFE of the AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM, Diane Ravitch has once again proven that she is the Grand Dame of the history of American education and once again has produced what must be classed as a permanent book a book scholars will turn to years from now as a standard sourcebook for American public education's virtues and vices.
Diane has always been a supporter of standards; as a public school teacher so am I. But Diane makes a powerful case that our scientism of day -which mistakenly believes schools can be judged or measured by such narrow instruments as scantron/edusoft bubble tests-is NOT an accurate measure of educational effectiveness.
Ravitch is also not afraid to state the obvious: the temptation for schools, teachers and administrators to game the system or cheat is sometimes overwhelming. Even honest administrators would be foolish not to drop students who never show up for class. The reason why is because NCLB hits schools for low participation points and students who don't show up count as a ZERO for school averages.
AYP's tell us something but they are not a valid barometer of true academic achievement. One would think that if a high school had 300 AP scholars a year that would count for something but it does not. But the reality that those 300 AP scholars are not merely proficient but far, far above state standards (ten times as much twenty times as much?). On the AYP's AP students are counted as just competent students. That would be like rating the US military but not counting the Special Forces or Marines. It is idiotic. Much of NCLB is idiotic and Ravitch proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
As a classroom teacher I know that teacher evaluations based on performance of standardized tests are notoriously biased. When I had all AP classes I was a genius and the "Jaime Escalante" of Bakersfield. The truth is even Jaime Escalante was not Jaime Escalante when he was challenged by a different school body with different problems and different cultural backgrounds than Mr. Escalante was accustomed to. And similarly, now that I have no AP students my test scores are no longer so stellar. The reality is the friends of the principal or departments chairs make sure to assign themselves the best classes so that THEIR teaching may not be called into question.
I am not afraid of having the lowest performing students however. I consider them a challenge and I consider it my duty to try to give these students the best quality education I can. But I am not a miracle worker. If my juniors are unable to read a single sentence of English how are they -in one year or two years- pass their proficiencies and complete the curriculum for college prep students in social studies? My job (as I see it) is to give these students an introduction to history, study skills and the reading of English. My theory is that the students must learn how to learn to read English first. If they can't do that then they cannot hope to engage the English medium curriculum. No one would expect first year American students of Spanish or French to score as well as high school students in France, Spain or Costa Rica so why should we expect immigrant students -often from the poorest and most disadvantaged classes- to read, write and score "ABOVE BASIC" , "PROFICIENT" or “ADVANCED on their standardized tests?
This writer remembers when Diane Ravitch was flirting with “voucherism” as a solution to low performing schools; but Ravitch examines the facts dispassionately and says "in sum, twenty years of vouchers in Milwaukee and a decade of the program's expansion to include religious school, there was no evidence of dramatic improvement for the neediest students or the public schools they left behind." Ravitch is exactly right that non-educators -often with no classroom experience- are simply not qualified to reform schools let alone run them.
Ravitch is blunt she says NCLB is wrong headed and "a timetable for the demolition of public education in the United States." Ravitch proves that Charter schools are no panacea. Ravitch proves that small schools (as touted by Bill Gates) are no solution. One thing she doesn't mention is that reforms like smaller schools and block schedules undermine and virtually destroy Advanced Placement programs because there are not the resources, students or teachers to sustain these programs. So in trying to improve a school we often dynamite the highest achieving classes. That makes no sense.
I am not irrevocably opposed to Charter schools or Catholic schools. In fact I spent much of my professional career teaching in Catholic schools or private education; at present I am still involved in tutoring “home schoolers” in subject areas their parents are unable to give them (such as Spanish and Latin). But like Ravitch I know that Charters ("school choice") by themselves are no answer to our societal and educational problem. And Ravitch documents the incompetence, theft and corruption associated with Charter schools such as The California Charter Academy which declared bankruptcy in 2004 stranding over 6000 students in more than 60 "storefront" schools. The founder of the organization -not an educator but a former insurance salesman- may have taken the State of California for over $100,000,000. That is no way to run a navy.
And by the way, does anyone think a nation can be defended by a citizen militia with private gunboats to protect the coast? Of course, not! No modern nation could defend itself on that basis. As Ron Unz noted many years ago not a single modern nation has dared to abandon universal public education. The USA would be very unwise if it were to abandon universal free public education.
Ravitch pulls no punches but is not a pessimistic doomsayer. She writes "If we want to improve education, we must first have a vision of what good education is. We should have goals that are worth striving for." Ravitch is right that our students need basic skills in literacy and numeracy but then says, wisely, "but that is not enough." Ravitch writes:
We want to prepare them for a useful life.
We want them to be able to think for themselves when they are out in the world on their own.
We want them to have a 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.
We want them to understand our nation and our world and the challenges we face.
We want them to be active, responsible citizens, and to reach decisions rationally. We want them to learn science and mathematics so they understand the problems of modern live and participate in finding solutions. We want them to enjoy the rich artistic and culture heritage of our society and other societies.
I may be mistaken but here I sense the influence of two other great teachers of the 20th century: NYU worthy Sidney Hook and another great Columbian like Dr. Ravitch, and one of the finest teachers and authors of the 20th century, Gilbert Highet. Hook, Sidney. (SEE "The Closing of the American Mind: An Intellectual Best-Seller Revisited." The. American Scholar 58 (1989): pp. 123-35.)
.
And I may be mistaken again but I sense at least indirectly the influence of Catholic educators on Ms. Ravitch because when she speaks like this she sounds like Sister Rosemary of Holy Names Academy (Seattle) one of the hardest work and most inspiring teachers I ever had the privilege to work with. But this just goes to show you how catholic (small c) the intellectual influences have been on Diane Ravitch. Diane is always thinking, always revising, always researching and always exploring. She may have visited more schools and interviewed and corresponded with more teachers from more states and more countries than anybody alive. Ravitch is not parochial at all and she is right when she notes that countries like Finland and Japan have excellent public systems without rewards or sanctions of any kind. Ravitch notes "their students excel at tested subjects because they are well educated in many other subjects that teach them to use language well and to wrestle with important ideas.”
Ravitch is also right that our very expensive text books are, for the most part, veritable quaking bogs of boredom and ennui or as she put it in THE LANGUAGE POLICE sanitized PC tomes that create "the Empire of Boredom." Ravitch notes such PC textbooks "maintain a studied air of neutrality, thus ensuring the triumph of dullness.
In fact, I feel it is my primary job as a classroom teacher to enliven the curriculum with humorous anecdotes and great stories. It never ceases to amaze me how students pick up things in classroom discussion such as Butch O'Hare's notorious father (an associate of Al Capone) , why German machine guns had three times the rate of fire of the best Allied machine guns, why Hitler's V-2 rocket program may have ensured Hitler's defeat, why Puerto Rico produces zero illegal aliens (due to the Jones Act of 1917), how the Polish Air Force smuggled out a Nazi Enigma machine to England and help win the Battle of the Atlantic, how Lesley Howard may have helped kept Spain neutral and so became a target of assassination by the Nazis- the story of Earl Warren's immigrant wife and parents (none of whom were native English-speakers), how Martin Luther King survived TWO assassination attempts prior to 1968, the fact 80 or 90 year old women could be wet nurses to babies- this was once very common place in the Highlands and Islands- , stories of Cubans working in the Gran Zafra (sugar cane harvest), how primitive medicine was even as late as 1915 -no blood transfusions or antibiotics- Tiger tanks shooting duds because the shells had been sabotaged by slave laborers, Jacqueline Kennedy's famous pink dress at Dallas, Mrs. Kennedy giving speeches in fluent French and Spanish, John F. Kennedy using Latin and German in his Berlin speech, how Roosevelt helped establish the March of Dimes, and the story of the Candy Bombers during the Berlin Airlift. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction and it is these very human stories and curious anecdotes that help make history come alive.
And I might add that public schools are not the only places where safe mediocrity reigns; most books on required reading lists in Teacher Ed programs were unknown 50 years ago and I dare say will be unknown 50 years from now. What a colossal waste of paper, time and resources! As a case in point a good argument could be made that one could learn more about the Cold War, politics and totalitarianism by reading and studying in depth three pieces of literature than every text book every written: the candidates would be Animal Farm by Orwell, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway, Dr. Zhivago by Pasternak or perhaps the First Circle by Solzhenitsyn. I know from experience that young peoples eyes light up when they read great literature filled with humor and insights.
Ravitch is absolutely right that curriculum, good curriculum is absolutely the sine qua non. She writes " It is a road map. Without a road map, you are sure to drive in circles and get nowhere...a sound curriculum ensures that young people will not remain ignorant of the most essential facts and ideas of the humanities and sciences."
Ravitch also has been made aware by her school visits and her many contacts with classroom teachers "in the trenches" how student behavior and civility has, essentially, collapsed. Teachers today hear more curse words and see more violence that any Marine recruit ever heard or witnessed in Camp Pendleton or Parris Island 30 years ago. Teachers are taxed to the breaking point by the constant challenge to their authority and disruptions to the learning process. It is a wonder more teachers don't break and attack their students. The fact is many teachers soldier on heroically resorting to mental health counseling and if things become unbearable they die or resign. I don't know of any teacher who gets combat pay or disability but they should. Just the other day a teacher had to take a loaded gun away from an intruder and it did not even make a line in the local paper. Ravitch is right on the mark when she says "schools must enforce standards of civility and teach student to respect themselves and others, or they cannot provide a safe, orderly environment which is necessary for learning."
Ravitch’s book is not a series of unsupported assertions by any means. Every chapter is very convincingly documented. My favorite chapter, as a school teacher, is chapter 9 "What would Mrs. Ratliff do?" Nobody knows Mrs. Ratliff but Ravitch makes it clear that Mrs. Ratliff was an unsung front line heroine of American civilization and education. American owes more to the Mrs. Ratliffs than most of its presidents past and present (if we are honest most were mediocre plodders or worse complete incompetents with a few glorious exceptions).
Who was Mrs.Ruby Ratliff ? She was none other than the mentor and homeroom teacher of Diane Ravitch herself. I found Ravitch's homage to her former teacher moving. Most teachers labor on in genteel poverty and rarely get any recognition but the teacher's reward is the gratitude of his or her many students. That is what makes it all worthwhile because one does not teach just for fun or for oneself but for the community and in a larger sense for one's civilization. Gilbert Highet once said that a teacher must know and love his subject and Ravitch emphasizes that Mrs. Ratliff loved her subject: the English language and its literature. Mrs. Ratliff had high standards and no doubt spent many hours after school and at home correcting essays, exams and reports. And Ravitch notes that Mrs. Ratliff did it all without once ever recurring to standardized multiple choice tests. That Ravitch does not say so I have a hunch she agrees with this classroom teacher that excessive use of standardized tests is like excessive consumption of junk food; in excess it is sheer poison.
One of the chief faults of American teachers and American education may be excessive overreliance on machine graded superficial bubble multiple guess tests which I may add are exceedingly easy to cheat on or fake. I am quite sure Mrs. Ratliff was never fooled by plagiarism or cheating and by her hands on familiarity with her students work easily spotted the `"rats" and "cheats".
If one seeks a `magic bullet' to cure our educational ills or as Ravitch humorously alludes to a "magic feather" a la Dumbo you will not find it here. Ravitch says "in education, there are no short cuts, no utopias, no silver bullets. For certain, there are no magic feathers that enable elephants to fly.
Truly, as Euclid reportedly said to King Ptolemy, “there is no Royal Road to Geometry." He or she who wants to learn mathematics, solve equations, writing clear prose and gain wisdom must toil and sweat for days, months and years on end. Ravitch is also right that the survival and success of our free society may depend on our public school system. If the public school system is allowed to wither away we may become more like Latin America (which has excellent private schools for the rich and non-existent or woefully inadequate public education for the many who are poor).
This way lies more than madness or bad policy.
This way lies social strife and class warfare to an extent that the independence, prosperity and unity of our Republic may be at risk.
Ravitch writes "it is unlikely that the United States would have emerged as a world leader had it left the development of education to the whim and will of the free market." In my opinion, she never wrote a truer line.
Education is neither about profit and loss nor merely about narrow utilitarian goals. America by its very nature has tended to be utilitarian and materialist for better or for worst. Success in America has always been measured by the accumulation of power, money, status, prestige, property and fame. In addition, Americans have always valued the new over the tried and true disregarding most traditions, -this is their philistine side - which when it comes to culture is often a mistake. The Greeks had a word for this “apeirokalia” (a lack of experience in things beautiful) and yet another which we could translate as `unculture' or "apaideusia" (ignorance of the greatest goods in life)..
Yet I would argue that the most enduring aspect of the American Dream is not these manifestations of pomp, prosperity and power-these things like the Almighty Dollar -presently quite anemic- our naval and air supremacy will pass away- but not the single most valuable we thing we have which is our free and splendid ancient heritage.
What are we to do? We must look firmly towards the future but must never forget the past -that is to say our splendid and free ancient heritage. Above all we must not throw in the towel. We must teach every man, woman and child to wish for liberty, to cherish liberty, to understand liberty and most importantly to be capable of it.
I always tell my students there are there are TWO educations:
The first education is the practical one we all need that teaches us what we need to make a living -most of us have to make a living.
The second education we need is the other education, the "true education" that which teaches us how to live our lives more fully by teaching us to think AND to appreciate `the Good Life". I can't imagine my life without the second education and I encourage my students to cultivate their private lives for their own benefit, happiness and enjoyment and for the unity and mental health of their families.
And we must have the humility and foresight to recognize a people without wisdom -without a strong culture- without a strong memory and strong values without strong schools- will come to ruin.
As we pass the torch to a new generation we are most fortunate to have the lantern of Ravitch's wisdom and learning to help us see a better way. With The Death and Life of the Great American School System Diane Ravitch has raised a monument more enduring than brass -to paraphrase Horace: Non omnis morieris.
Some years ago Diane Ravitch wrote LEFT BACK which is a minor masterpiece; years from now historians will recommend one book to understand the background of American public education and it will be LEFT BACK. With her new book, THE DEATH AND LIFE of the AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM, Diane Ravitch has once again proven that she is the Grand Dame of the history of American education and once again has produced what must be classed as a permanent book a book scholars will turn to years from now as a standard sourcebook for American public education's virtues and vices.
Diane has always been a supporter of standards; as a public school teacher so am I. But Diane makes a powerful case that our scientism of day -which mistakenly believes schools can be judged or measured by such narrow instruments as scantron/edusoft bubble tests-is NOT an accurate measure of educational effectiveness.
Ravitch is also not afraid to state the obvious: the temptation for schools, teachers and administrators to game the system or cheat is sometimes overwhelming. Even honest administrators would be foolish not to drop students who never show up for class. The reason why is because NCLB hits schools for low participation points and students who don't show up count as a ZERO for school averages.
AYP's tell us something but they are not a valid barometer of true academic achievement. One would think that if a high school had 300 AP scholars a year that would count for something but it does not. But the reality that those 300 AP scholars are not merely proficient but far, far above state standards (ten times as much twenty times as much?). On the AYP's AP students are counted as just competent students. That would be like rating the US military but not counting the Special Forces or Marines. It is idiotic. Much of NCLB is idiotic and Ravitch proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
As a classroom teacher I know that teacher evaluations based on performance of standardized tests are notoriously biased. When I had all AP classes I was a genius and the "Jaime Escalante" of Bakersfield. The truth is even Jaime Escalante was not Jaime Escalante when he was challenged by a different school body with different problems and different cultural backgrounds than Mr. Escalante was accustomed to. And similarly, now that I have no AP students my test scores are no longer so stellar. The reality is the friends of the principal or departments chairs make sure to assign themselves the best classes so that THEIR teaching may not be called into question.
I am not afraid of having the lowest performing students however. I consider them a challenge and I consider it my duty to try to give these students the best quality education I can. But I am not a miracle worker. If my juniors are unable to read a single sentence of English how are they -in one year or two years- pass their proficiencies and complete the curriculum for college prep students in social studies? My job (as I see it) is to give these students an introduction to history, study skills and the reading of English. My theory is that the students must learn how to learn to read English first. If they can't do that then they cannot hope to engage the English medium curriculum. No one would expect first year American students of Spanish or French to score as well as high school students in France, Spain or Costa Rica so why should we expect immigrant students -often from the poorest and most disadvantaged classes- to read, write and score "ABOVE BASIC" , "PROFICIENT" or “ADVANCED on their standardized tests?
This writer remembers when Diane Ravitch was flirting with “voucherism” as a solution to low performing schools; but Ravitch examines the facts dispassionately and says "in sum, twenty years of vouchers in Milwaukee and a decade of the program's expansion to include religious school, there was no evidence of dramatic improvement for the neediest students or the public schools they left behind." Ravitch is exactly right that non-educators -often with no classroom experience- are simply not qualified to reform schools let alone run them.
Ravitch is blunt she says NCLB is wrong headed and "a timetable for the demolition of public education in the United States." Ravitch proves that Charter schools are no panacea. Ravitch proves that small schools (as touted by Bill Gates) are no solution. One thing she doesn't mention is that reforms like smaller schools and block schedules undermine and virtually destroy Advanced Placement programs because there are not the resources, students or teachers to sustain these programs. So in trying to improve a school we often dynamite the highest achieving classes. That makes no sense.
I am not irrevocably opposed to Charter schools or Catholic schools. In fact I spent much of my professional career teaching in Catholic schools or private education; at present I am still involved in tutoring “home schoolers” in subject areas their parents are unable to give them (such as Spanish and Latin). But like Ravitch I know that Charters ("school choice") by themselves are no answer to our societal and educational problem. And Ravitch documents the incompetence, theft and corruption associated with Charter schools such as The California Charter Academy which declared bankruptcy in 2004 stranding over 6000 students in more than 60 "storefront" schools. The founder of the organization -not an educator but a former insurance salesman- may have taken the State of California for over $100,000,000. That is no way to run a navy.
And by the way, does anyone think a nation can be defended by a citizen militia with private gunboats to protect the coast? Of course, not! No modern nation could defend itself on that basis. As Ron Unz noted many years ago not a single modern nation has dared to abandon universal public education. The USA would be very unwise if it were to abandon universal free public education.
Ravitch pulls no punches but is not a pessimistic doomsayer. She writes "If we want to improve education, we must first have a vision of what good education is. We should have goals that are worth striving for." Ravitch is right that our students need basic skills in literacy and numeracy but then says, wisely, "but that is not enough." Ravitch writes:
We want to prepare them for a useful life.
We want them to be able to think for themselves when they are out in the world on their own.
We want them to have a 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.
We want them to understand our nation and our world and the challenges we face.
We want them to be active, responsible citizens, and to reach decisions rationally. We want them to learn science and mathematics so they understand the problems of modern live and participate in finding solutions. We want them to enjoy the rich artistic and culture heritage of our society and other societies.
I may be mistaken but here I sense the influence of two other great teachers of the 20th century: NYU worthy Sidney Hook and another great Columbian like Dr. Ravitch, and one of the finest teachers and authors of the 20th century, Gilbert Highet. Hook, Sidney. (SEE "The Closing of the American Mind: An Intellectual Best-Seller Revisited." The. American Scholar 58 (1989): pp. 123-35.)
.
And I may be mistaken again but I sense at least indirectly the influence of Catholic educators on Ms. Ravitch because when she speaks like this she sounds like Sister Rosemary of Holy Names Academy (Seattle) one of the hardest work and most inspiring teachers I ever had the privilege to work with. But this just goes to show you how catholic (small c) the intellectual influences have been on Diane Ravitch. Diane is always thinking, always revising, always researching and always exploring. She may have visited more schools and interviewed and corresponded with more teachers from more states and more countries than anybody alive. Ravitch is not parochial at all and she is right when she notes that countries like Finland and Japan have excellent public systems without rewards or sanctions of any kind. Ravitch notes "their students excel at tested subjects because they are well educated in many other subjects that teach them to use language well and to wrestle with important ideas.”
Ravitch is also right that our very expensive text books are, for the most part, veritable quaking bogs of boredom and ennui or as she put it in THE LANGUAGE POLICE sanitized PC tomes that create "the Empire of Boredom." Ravitch notes such PC textbooks "maintain a studied air of neutrality, thus ensuring the triumph of dullness.
In fact, I feel it is my primary job as a classroom teacher to enliven the curriculum with humorous anecdotes and great stories. It never ceases to amaze me how students pick up things in classroom discussion such as Butch O'Hare's notorious father (an associate of Al Capone) , why German machine guns had three times the rate of fire of the best Allied machine guns, why Hitler's V-2 rocket program may have ensured Hitler's defeat, why Puerto Rico produces zero illegal aliens (due to the Jones Act of 1917), how the Polish Air Force smuggled out a Nazi Enigma machine to England and help win the Battle of the Atlantic, how Lesley Howard may have helped kept Spain neutral and so became a target of assassination by the Nazis- the story of Earl Warren's immigrant wife and parents (none of whom were native English-speakers), how Martin Luther King survived TWO assassination attempts prior to 1968, the fact 80 or 90 year old women could be wet nurses to babies- this was once very common place in the Highlands and Islands- , stories of Cubans working in the Gran Zafra (sugar cane harvest), how primitive medicine was even as late as 1915 -no blood transfusions or antibiotics- Tiger tanks shooting duds because the shells had been sabotaged by slave laborers, Jacqueline Kennedy's famous pink dress at Dallas, Mrs. Kennedy giving speeches in fluent French and Spanish, John F. Kennedy using Latin and German in his Berlin speech, how Roosevelt helped establish the March of Dimes, and the story of the Candy Bombers during the Berlin Airlift. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction and it is these very human stories and curious anecdotes that help make history come alive.
And I might add that public schools are not the only places where safe mediocrity reigns; most books on required reading lists in Teacher Ed programs were unknown 50 years ago and I dare say will be unknown 50 years from now. What a colossal waste of paper, time and resources! As a case in point a good argument could be made that one could learn more about the Cold War, politics and totalitarianism by reading and studying in depth three pieces of literature than every text book every written: the candidates would be Animal Farm by Orwell, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway, Dr. Zhivago by Pasternak or perhaps the First Circle by Solzhenitsyn. I know from experience that young peoples eyes light up when they read great literature filled with humor and insights.
Ravitch is absolutely right that curriculum, good curriculum is absolutely the sine qua non. She writes " It is a road map. Without a road map, you are sure to drive in circles and get nowhere...a sound curriculum ensures that young people will not remain ignorant of the most essential facts and ideas of the humanities and sciences."
Ravitch also has been made aware by her school visits and her many contacts with classroom teachers "in the trenches" how student behavior and civility has, essentially, collapsed. Teachers today hear more curse words and see more violence that any Marine recruit ever heard or witnessed in Camp Pendleton or Parris Island 30 years ago. Teachers are taxed to the breaking point by the constant challenge to their authority and disruptions to the learning process. It is a wonder more teachers don't break and attack their students. The fact is many teachers soldier on heroically resorting to mental health counseling and if things become unbearable they die or resign. I don't know of any teacher who gets combat pay or disability but they should. Just the other day a teacher had to take a loaded gun away from an intruder and it did not even make a line in the local paper. Ravitch is right on the mark when she says "schools must enforce standards of civility and teach student to respect themselves and others, or they cannot provide a safe, orderly environment which is necessary for learning."
Ravitch’s book is not a series of unsupported assertions by any means. Every chapter is very convincingly documented. My favorite chapter, as a school teacher, is chapter 9 "What would Mrs. Ratliff do?" Nobody knows Mrs. Ratliff but Ravitch makes it clear that Mrs. Ratliff was an unsung front line heroine of American civilization and education. American owes more to the Mrs. Ratliffs than most of its presidents past and present (if we are honest most were mediocre plodders or worse complete incompetents with a few glorious exceptions).
Who was Mrs.Ruby Ratliff ? She was none other than the mentor and homeroom teacher of Diane Ravitch herself. I found Ravitch's homage to her former teacher moving. Most teachers labor on in genteel poverty and rarely get any recognition but the teacher's reward is the gratitude of his or her many students. That is what makes it all worthwhile because one does not teach just for fun or for oneself but for the community and in a larger sense for one's civilization. Gilbert Highet once said that a teacher must know and love his subject and Ravitch emphasizes that Mrs. Ratliff loved her subject: the English language and its literature. Mrs. Ratliff had high standards and no doubt spent many hours after school and at home correcting essays, exams and reports. And Ravitch notes that Mrs. Ratliff did it all without once ever recurring to standardized multiple choice tests. That Ravitch does not say so I have a hunch she agrees with this classroom teacher that excessive use of standardized tests is like excessive consumption of junk food; in excess it is sheer poison.
One of the chief faults of American teachers and American education may be excessive overreliance on machine graded superficial bubble multiple guess tests which I may add are exceedingly easy to cheat on or fake. I am quite sure Mrs. Ratliff was never fooled by plagiarism or cheating and by her hands on familiarity with her students work easily spotted the `"rats" and "cheats".
If one seeks a `magic bullet' to cure our educational ills or as Ravitch humorously alludes to a "magic feather" a la Dumbo you will not find it here. Ravitch says "in education, there are no short cuts, no utopias, no silver bullets. For certain, there are no magic feathers that enable elephants to fly.
Truly, as Euclid reportedly said to King Ptolemy, “there is no Royal Road to Geometry." He or she who wants to learn mathematics, solve equations, writing clear prose and gain wisdom must toil and sweat for days, months and years on end. Ravitch is also right that the survival and success of our free society may depend on our public school system. If the public school system is allowed to wither away we may become more like Latin America (which has excellent private schools for the rich and non-existent or woefully inadequate public education for the many who are poor).
This way lies more than madness or bad policy.
This way lies social strife and class warfare to an extent that the independence, prosperity and unity of our Republic may be at risk.
Ravitch writes "it is unlikely that the United States would have emerged as a world leader had it left the development of education to the whim and will of the free market." In my opinion, she never wrote a truer line.
Education is neither about profit and loss nor merely about narrow utilitarian goals. America by its very nature has tended to be utilitarian and materialist for better or for worst. Success in America has always been measured by the accumulation of power, money, status, prestige, property and fame. In addition, Americans have always valued the new over the tried and true disregarding most traditions, -this is their philistine side - which when it comes to culture is often a mistake. The Greeks had a word for this “apeirokalia” (a lack of experience in things beautiful) and yet another which we could translate as `unculture' or "apaideusia" (ignorance of the greatest goods in life)..
Yet I would argue that the most enduring aspect of the American Dream is not these manifestations of pomp, prosperity and power-these things like the Almighty Dollar -presently quite anemic- our naval and air supremacy will pass away- but not the single most valuable we thing we have which is our free and splendid ancient heritage.
What are we to do? We must look firmly towards the future but must never forget the past -that is to say our splendid and free ancient heritage. Above all we must not throw in the towel. We must teach every man, woman and child to wish for liberty, to cherish liberty, to understand liberty and most importantly to be capable of it.
I always tell my students there are there are TWO educations:
The first education is the practical one we all need that teaches us what we need to make a living -most of us have to make a living.
The second education we need is the other education, the "true education" that which teaches us how to live our lives more fully by teaching us to think AND to appreciate `the Good Life". I can't imagine my life without the second education and I encourage my students to cultivate their private lives for their own benefit, happiness and enjoyment and for the unity and mental health of their families.
And we must have the humility and foresight to recognize a people without wisdom -without a strong culture- without a strong memory and strong values without strong schools- will come to ruin.
As we pass the torch to a new generation we are most fortunate to have the lantern of Ravitch's wisdom and learning to help us see a better way. With The Death and Life of the Great American School System Diane Ravitch has raised a monument more enduring than brass -to paraphrase Horace: Non omnis morieris.
Some years ago Diane Ravitch wrote LEFT BACK which is a minor masterpiece; years from now historians will recommend one book to understand the background of American public education and it will be LEFT BACK. With her new book, THE DEATH AND LIFE of the AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM, Diane Ravitch has once again proven that she is the Grand Dame of the history of American education and once again has produced what must be classed as a permanent book a book scholars will turn to years from now as a standard sourcebook for American public education's virtues and vices.
Diane has always been a supporter of standards; as a public school teacher so am I. But Diane makes a powerful case that our scientism of day -which mistakenly believes schools can be judged or measured by such narrow instruments as scantron/edusoft bubble tests-is NOT an accurate measure of educational effectiveness.
Ravitch is also not afraid to state the obvious: the temptation for schools, teachers and administrators to game the system or cheat is sometimes overwhelming. Even honest administrators would be foolish not to drop students who never show up for class. The reason why is because NCLB hits schools for low participation points and students who don't show up count as a ZERO for school averages.
AYP's tell us something but they are not a valid barometer of true academic achievement. One would think that if a high school had 300 AP scholars a year that would count for something but it does not. But the reality that those 300 AP scholars are not merely proficient but far, far above state standards (ten times as much twenty times as much?). On the AYP's AP students are counted as just competent students. That would be like rating the US military but not counting the Special Forces or Marines. It is idiotic. Much of NCLB is idiotic and Ravitch proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
As a classroom teacher I know that teacher evaluations based on performance of standardized tests are notoriously biased. When I had all AP classes I was a genius and the "Jaime Escalante" of Bakersfield. The truth is even Jaime Escalante was not Jaime Escalante when he was challenged by a different school body with different problems and different cultural backgrounds than Mr. Escalante was accustomed to. And similarly, now that I have no AP students my test scores are no longer so stellar. The reality is the friends of the principal or departments chairs make sure to assign themselves the best classes so that THEIR teaching may not be called into question.
I am not afraid of having the lowest performing students however. I consider them a challenge and I consider it my duty to try to give these students the best quality education I can. But I am not a miracle worker. If my juniors are unable to read a single sentence of English how are they -in one year or two years- pass their proficiencies and complete the curriculum for college prep students in social studies? My job (as I see it) is to give these students an introduction to history, study skills and the reading of English. My theory is that the students must learn how to learn to read English first. If they can't do that then they cannot hope to engage the English medium curriculum. No one would expect first year American students of Spanish or French to score as well as high school students in France, Spain or Costa Rica so why should we expect immigrant students -often from the poorest and most disadvantaged classes- to read, write and score "ABOVE BASIC" , "PROFICIENT" or “ADVANCED on their standardized tests?
This writer remembers when Diane Ravitch was flirting with “voucherism” as a solution to low performing schools; but Ravitch examines the facts dispassionately and says "in sum, twenty years of vouchers in Milwaukee and a decade of the program's expansion to include religious school, there was no evidence of dramatic improvement for the neediest students or the public schools they left behind." Ravitch is exactly right that non-educators -often with no classroom experience- are simply not qualified to reform schools let alone run them.
Ravitch is blunt she says NCLB is wrong headed and "a timetable for the demolition of public education in the United States." Ravitch proves that Charter schools are no panacea. Ravitch proves that small schools (as touted by Bill Gates) are no solution. One thing she doesn't mention is that reforms like smaller schools and block schedules undermine and virtually destroy Advanced Placement programs because there are not the resources, students or teachers to sustain these programs. So in trying to improve a school we often dynamite the highest achieving classes. That makes no sense.
I am not irrevocably opposed to Charter schools or Catholic schools. In fact I spent much of my professional career teaching in Catholic schools or private education; at present I am still involved in tutoring “home schoolers” in subject areas their parents are unable to give them (such as Spanish and Latin). But like Ravitch I know that Charters ("school choice") by themselves are no answer to our societal and educational problem. And Ravitch documents the incompetence, theft and corruption associated with Charter schools such as The California Charter Academy which declared bankruptcy in 2004 stranding over 6000 students in more than 60 "storefront" schools. The founder of the organization -not an educator but a former insurance salesman- may have taken the State of California for over $100,000,000. That is no way to run a navy.
And by the way, does anyone think a nation can be defended by a citizen militia with private gunboats to protect the coast? Of course, not! No modern nation could defend itself on that basis. As Ron Unz noted many years ago not a single modern nation has dared to abandon universal public education. The USA would be very unwise if it were to abandon universal free public education.
Ravitch pulls no punches but is not a pessimistic doomsayer. She writes "If we want to improve education, we must first have a vision of what good education is. We should have goals that are worth striving for." Ravitch is right that our students need basic skills in literacy and numeracy but then says, wisely, "but that is not enough." Ravitch writes:
We want to prepare them for a useful life.
We want them to be able to think for themselves when they are out in the world on their own.
We want them to have a 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.
We want them to understand our nation and our world and the challenges we face.
We want them to be active, responsible citizens, and to reach decisions rationally. We want them to learn science and mathematics so they understand the problems of modern live and participate in finding solutions. We want them to enjoy the rich artistic and culture heritage of our society and other societies.
I may be mistaken but here I sense the influence of two other great teachers of the 20th century: NYU worthy Sidney Hook and another great Columbian like Dr. Ravitch, and one of the finest teachers and authors of the 20th century, Gilbert Highet. Hook, Sidney. (SEE "The Closing of the American Mind: An Intellectual Best-Seller Revisited." The. American Scholar 58 (1989): pp. 123-35.)
.
And I may be mistaken again but I sense at least indirectly the influence of Catholic educators on Ms. Ravitch because when she speaks like this she sounds like Sister Rosemary of Holy Names Academy (Seattle) one of the hardest work and most inspiring teachers I ever had the privilege to work with. But this just goes to show you how catholic (small c) the intellectual influences have been on Diane Ravitch. Diane is always thinking, always revising, always researching and always exploring. She may have visited more schools and interviewed and corresponded with more teachers from more states and more countries than anybody alive. Ravitch is not parochial at all and she is right when she notes that countries like Finland and Japan have excellent public systems without rewards or sanctions of any kind. Ravitch notes "their students excel at tested subjects because they are well educated in many other subjects that teach them to use language well and to wrestle with important ideas.”
Ravitch is also right that our very expensive text books are, for the most part, veritable quaking bogs of boredom and ennui or as she put it in THE LANGUAGE POLICE sanitized PC tomes that create "the Empire of Boredom." Ravitch notes such PC textbooks "maintain a studied air of neutrality, thus ensuring the triumph of dullness.
In fact, I feel it is my primary job as a classroom teacher to enliven the curriculum with humorous anecdotes and great stories. It never ceases to amaze me how students pick up things in classroom discussion such as Butch O'Hare's notorious father (an associate of Al Capone) , why German machine guns had three times the rate of fire of the best Allied machine guns, why Hitler's V-2 rocket program may have ensured Hitler's defeat, why Puerto Rico produces zero illegal aliens (due to the Jones Act of 1917), how the Polish Air Force smuggled out a Nazi Enigma machine to England and help win the Battle of the Atlantic, how Lesley Howard may have helped kept Spain neutral and so became a target of assassination by the Nazis- the story of Earl Warren's immigrant wife and parents (none of whom were native English-speakers), how Martin Luther King survived TWO assassination attempts prior to 1968, the fact 80 or 90 year old women could be wet nurses to babies- this was once very common place in the Highlands and Islands- , stories of Cubans working in the Gran Zafra (sugar cane harvest), how primitive medicine was even as late as 1915 -no blood transfusions or antibiotics- Tiger tanks shooting duds because the shells had been sabotaged by slave laborers, Jacqueline Kennedy's famous pink dress at Dallas, Mrs. Kennedy giving speeches in fluent French and Spanish, John F. Kennedy using Latin and German in his Berlin speech, how Roosevelt helped establish the March of Dimes, and the story of the Candy Bombers during the Berlin Airlift. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction and it is these very human stories and curious anecdotes that help make history come alive.
And I might add that public schools are not the only places where safe mediocrity reigns; most books on required reading lists in Teacher Ed programs were unknown 50 years ago and I dare say will be unknown 50 years from now. What a colossal waste of paper, time and resources! As a case in point a good argument could be made that one could learn more about the Cold War, politics and totalitarianism by reading and studying in depth three pieces of literature than every text book every written: the candidates would be Animal Farm by Orwell, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway, Dr. Zhivago by Pasternak or perhaps the First Circle by Solzhenitsyn. I know from experience that young peoples eyes light up when they read great literature filled with humor and insights.
Ravitch is absolutely right that curriculum, good curriculum is absolutely the sine qua non. She writes " It is a road map. Without a road map, you are sure to drive in circles and get nowhere...a sound curriculum ensures that young people will not remain ignorant of the most essential facts and ideas of the humanities and sciences."
Ravitch also has been made aware by her school visits and her many contacts with classroom teachers "in the trenches" how student behavior and civility has, essentially, collapsed. Teachers today hear more curse words and see more violence that any Marine recruit ever heard or witnessed in Camp Pendleton or Parris Island 30 years ago. Teachers are taxed to the breaking point by the constant challenge to their authority and disruptions to the learning process. It is a wonder more teachers don't break and attack their students. The fact is many teachers soldier on heroically resorting to mental health counseling and if things become unbearable they die or resign. I don't know of any teacher who gets combat pay or disability but they should. Just the other day a teacher had to take a loaded gun away from an intruder and it did not even make a line in the local paper. Ravitch is right on the mark when she says "schools must enforce standards of civility and teach student to respect themselves and others, or they cannot provide a safe, orderly environment which is necessary for learning."
Ravitch’s book is not a series of unsupported assertions by any means. Every chapter is very convincingly documented. My favorite chapter, as a school teacher, is chapter 9 "What would Mrs. Ratliff do?" Nobody knows Mrs. Ratliff but Ravitch makes it clear that Mrs. Ratliff was an unsung front line heroine of American civilization and education. American owes more to the Mrs. Ratliffs than most of its presidents past and present (if we are honest most were mediocre plodders or worse complete incompetents with a few glorious exceptions).
Who was Mrs.Ruby Ratliff ? She was none other than the mentor and homeroom teacher of Diane Ravitch herself. I found Ravitch's homage to her former teacher moving. Most teachers labor on in genteel poverty and rarely get any recognition but the teacher's reward is the gratitude of his or her many students. That is what makes it all worthwhile because one does not teach just for fun or for oneself but for the community and in a larger sense for one's civilization. Gilbert Highet once said that a teacher must know and love his subject and Ravitch emphasizes that Mrs. Ratliff loved her subject: the English language and its literature. Mrs. Ratliff had high standards and no doubt spent many hours after school and at home correcting essays, exams and reports. And Ravitch notes that Mrs. Ratliff did it all without once ever recurring to standardized multiple choice tests. That Ravitch does not say so I have a hunch she agrees with this classroom teacher that excessive use of standardized tests is like excessive consumption of junk food; in excess it is sheer poison.
One of the chief faults of American teachers and American education may be excessive overreliance on machine graded superficial bubble multiple guess tests which I may add are exceedingly easy to cheat on or fake. I am quite sure Mrs. Ratliff was never fooled by plagiarism or cheating and by her hands on familiarity with her students work easily spotted the `"rats" and "cheats".
If one seeks a `magic bullet' to cure our educational ills or as Ravitch humorously alludes to a "magic feather" a la Dumbo you will not find it here. Ravitch says "in education, there are no short cuts, no utopias, no silver bullets. For certain, there are no magic feathers that enable elephants to fly.
Truly, as Euclid reportedly said to King Ptolemy, “there is no Royal Road to Geometry." He or she who wants to learn mathematics, solve equations, writing clear prose and gain wisdom must toil and sweat for days, months and years on end. Ravitch is also right that the survival and success of our free society may depend on our public school system. If the public school system is allowed to wither away we may become more like Latin America (which has excellent private schools for the rich and non-existent or woefully inadequate public education for the many who are poor).
This way lies more than madness or bad policy.
This way lies social strife and class warfare to an extent that the independence, prosperity and unity of our Republic may be at risk.
Ravitch writes "it is unlikely that the United States would have emerged as a world leader had it left the development of education to the whim and will of the free market." In my opinion, she never wrote a truer line.
Education is neither about profit and loss nor merely about narrow utilitarian goals. America by its very nature has tended to be utilitarian and materialist for better or for worst. Success in America has always been measured by the accumulation of power, money, status, prestige, property and fame. In addition, Americans have always valued the new over the tried and true disregarding most traditions, -this is their philistine side - which when it comes to culture is often a mistake. The Greeks had a word for this “apeirokalia” (a lack of experience in things beautiful) and yet another which we could translate as `unculture' or "apaideusia" (ignorance of the greatest goods in life)..
Yet I would argue that the most enduring aspect of the American Dream is not these manifestations of pomp, prosperity and power-these things like the Almighty Dollar -presently quite anemic- our naval and air supremacy will pass away- but not the single most valuable we thing we have which is our free and splendid ancient heritage.
What are we to do? We must look firmly towards the future but must never forget the past -that is to say our splendid and free ancient heritage. Above all we must not throw in the towel. We must teach every man, woman and child to wish for liberty, to cherish liberty, to understand liberty and most importantly to be capable of it.
I always tell my students there are there are TWO educations:
The first education is the practical one we all need that teaches us what we need to make a living -most of us have to make a living.
The second education we need is the other education, the "true education" that which teaches us how to live our lives more fully by teaching us to think AND to appreciate `the Good Life". I can't imagine my life without the second education and I encourage my students to cultivate their private lives for their own benefit, happiness and enjoyment and for the unity and mental health of their families.
And we must have the humility and foresight to recognize a people without wisdom -without a strong culture- without a strong memory and strong values without strong schools- will come to ruin.
As we pass the torch to a new generation we are most fortunate to have the lantern of Ravitch's wisdom and learning to help us see a better way. With The Death and Life of the Great American School System Diane Ravitch has raised a monument more enduring than brass -to paraphrase Horace: Non omnis morieris.
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