Race, Reform, & Ravitch

2,033 words

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

Ask almost anyone about the state of education in the United States (or even more broadly across Western countries) and they will express concern over low test scores, students being unprepared for college and the workplace, and a lack of civil and cultural knowledge. For many of the elites—politicians like George Bush and Barack Obama, businessmen like Bill Gates and Eli Broad, and the foundations established by the wealthy men such as Sam Walton and Rockfeller—the solution is to run education more like a business: competition, deregulation, and increased quantification and data collection. In her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane Ravitch attempts to dismantle, or at least cause readers to step back and reevaluate, some of the proposed and implemented reforms to the education system. While not directly addressed, the issues of race looms between the lines of Ravitch’s writings as the unspoken reason why reforms have failed.

Ravitch was born to a Jewish family in Texas, where she attended public school. She graduated from Columbia University with a PhD in the history of education. During the presidency of George H.W. Bush, she served as the Assistant Secretary of Education. Afterward, she worked for the National Assessment Governing Board and then the Brookings Institution. During that time, she promoted the ideas of school choice via vouchers and charter schools, and using “high-stakes” testing to reward and punish schools and teachers based on student results. After the No Child Left Behind Act began its implementation, she began to question her previous assumptions, which resulted in her writing The Death and Life of the Great American School System in 2010.

The book focuses on three main criticisms Ravitch has of the Bush-Obama education policies: standardized testing, charter schools, and accountability measures. She fears that the emphasis on reading and math testing increases the time spent on those subjects at the expense of history, art, physical education, civics, and other electives, and encourages cheating and manipulation to give the appearance of improving scores. While not completely disowning the idea of charter schools, Ravitch shows that charter and private schools produce minimal increases, and sometimes negative effects, on students’ academic outcomes. Finally, while at face value it sounds nice to hold teachers accountable for student outcomes, teachers are only one factor in a student’s life, and it would be unfair to penalize them for circumstances beyond their control (such as a student’s motivation and parental support, or lack thereof).

Perhaps the most telling sentence of the book, with variations repeated throughout, is: “It seems that the only guaranteed strategy [to improve test scores] is to change the student population, replacing low-performing students with higher-performing students” (p. 105). Who are these low-performing and high-performing students? Blacks, Hispanics, special education students, and English language learners (read: non-white refugees and immigrants) compose the former category while whites and Asians make up the latter.

Ravitch argues that school type made little to no difference in the test results of students. “When students were compared by race and ethnicity, there was little difference in the test scores of students in charter schools and regular public schools” (p. 140). In terms of reading and mathematical ability, what matters is not where the students go, but who they are.

The reformers Ravitch argues against promote the idea that if students receive great teachers (greatness being measured by increasing student test scores), it would close the achievement gap between blacks and whites. They theorized that if a great teacher could raise a student’s score by 5 percentile points, then a series of top teachers back-to-back could close the 34 percentile point gap between black and white students in three to five years (p. 183-84). Ravitch counters with two points: first, that teachers are not consistently “great” from year to year. A teacher may be in the top quartile for student improvement one year and then the bottom quartile the next, or vice versa. Her second point is that, contrary to much of the debate surrounding education policy, student results do not lie solely in the teacher’s control. Giving a high-performing teacher low-performing students is more likely to drop the teacher’s evaluation than it is to raise the students’ test scores (p. 185).

Effectively, barring the upper and lower edges, it does not matter whether a student goes to a public school, charter school, or receives vouchers for a private school; it does not matter whether they have a great, average, or mediocre teacher; each student will reach the same levels in reading and math if any of those variables are changed. Those proposed panaceas have failed to improve scores or lessen the persistent divide between White-Asian students and their African-Hispanic peers.

It is perhaps a comforting thought to know that most white students will reach proficient levels of reading and arithmetic regardless of the school type or teachers’ pedagogical methods. White students will learn in a traditional school setting or even in classrooms adopting new “progressive” methods of instruction. The black education writer Lisa Delpit described how she set up her kindergarten classroom using an open classroom plan with learning stations—the newest pedagogical fads she learned at university:

White students zoomed ahead. They worked hard at the learning stations. They did amazing things with books and writing. My black students played the games; they learned how to weave; and they threw the books about the learning stations. They practiced karate moves on the new carpets. Some of them even learned how to read, but none of them as quickly as the white students.[1]

But for most parents, simply knowing your child will be proficient isn’t enough, and that is where Ravitch’s arguments against public schools begin to fall short. Sure, high-performing students will perform well whether you send them to a public or charter school, but where will they be safer? What social connections will they form? What will be the expectations and standards amongst their peers—especially considering that most teenagers value the opinions of their peers over their parents? Beyond reading and math, what will your child learn of culture, science, history, and literature?

In public schools, students now read novels such as The Hate U Give in their English classes to teach students that “cops be racist,” whereas students in a classical charter school would be reading works like The Odyssey and Paradise Lost to connect them with their cultural heritage.[2] From a quantitative perspective, focused on test scores, both sets of students may score similarly on reading, but the quality of one education exceeds the other.

Ravitch traces the idea of “school choice” to the 50s and 60s as a response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. As the federal government sought to enforce desegregation, some Southern states began to establish “segregation academies,” private schools for White students fleeing their newly integrated public schools. Virginia even provided tuition grants for students to enroll in private schools (p. 114). Other areas opened magnet schools with the purpose of providing an escape for White students within predominantly non-White urban districts.

It was under Reagan, adapting ideas from Milton Friedman, that school choice began to shed its explicitly segregationist vestments. Reagan supported vouchers, allowing parents to more easily enroll their children in private schools, but in 1991, Minnesota became the first state to authorize the creation of charter schools. Charter schools, unlike vouchers, gained bipartisan support and rapidly proliferated, with almost 8,000 currently operating across the United States. Ravitch notes that when freed from the standard regulations, some charter schools began to focus “on specific cultures, whether Afrocentric or Greek or Native American or Hebrew or Arabic.” It appears that when given a choice, not just Whites desire to create a place of their own. In fact, she cites 2009 research by the Brookings Institution that indicates “charters probably promoted racial segregation, since parents chose schools ‘with a racial profile matching their own'” (p. 143).

While the rhetoric surrounding school choice has changed over the last six decades, the purpose remains the same. When parents talk about sending their children to a “good school,” they mean a White school. When reformers call for a parent’s right to choose their child’s school, they mean (whether they consciously realize it or not) a parent’s right to separate their children from Blacks and Hispanics (except for W.E.B. Du Bois’ talented tenth).

An unfortunate downside of the school-choice movement is that it exacerbates the disintegration of communal bonds. When cities had only one school for their children, it served as a center for the community to gather. The proliferation of private and charter schools dismantles one of the few institutions that encouraged people to congregate, build connections that turn strangers into neighbors, and solve local problems. The problem with turning schools into a marketplace is that it “dissolves communities and replaces them with consumers” (pg. 221).

The Death and Life of the Great American School System paints a bleak picture for school reformers. While avoiding human biodiversity arguments and race realism, the facts presented show no successful method of consistently improving the scores of any racial group, which means that the lower scores of Black and Hispanic students in reading and math have no clear path to improvement via school choice, teacher accountability, or new pedagogical methods. One must consider the billions of dollars that could be reallocated from this lost cause if reformers, businessmen, and politicians chose to accept reality rather than kicking against the pricks.

Strangely, after writing an entire book about how moving students between schools and teachers resulted in inconsequential changes to the test results of students, three years later, in Reign of Error, her follow-up book responding to criticism that she presented no plan for improvement and merely attacked proposed reforms, Ravitch wrote, “the root causes of poor academic performance are segregation and poverty.”[3] The complaint about modern de facto segregated schools defines them as any school that is majority non-White. By labeling segregation as a root cause of poor academic performance, Ravitch seems to believe that access to White people will magically increase the scores of minority students. Yet, the data and anecdotes presented in her previous book indicate otherwise.

Perhaps she hopes that a “peer effect” will take place if Black students are placed with White students: “Students may take their schoolwork more seriously when they are in a school where almost all their classmates are trying their best to do well and disruptive behavior is not tolerated” (pg. 144). But, if it requires “almost all” students to be on board in order to pull up the dregs, there comes a tipping point when the unmotivated students begin dragging down the academically inclined. Implementing methods to end de facto segregation would likely prove more injurious to the White population than advantageous for the Black-Hispanic students.

If any progress is to be made toward improving education in the United States, reformers must stop beating around the bush of race issues: first, race differences must be acknowledged rather than blindly ignoring them and lashing out at those who point them out. Treating all people, and all groups, as interchangeable with the proper social conditioning will only lead to disappointment and resentment from all involved. Secondly, the majority of ethnic-racial-cultural groups desire to be around people of similar backgrounds. Allowing separation, rather than trying to penalize those who want it and forcing it to be concealed behind code words, would allow for improved educational outcomes in areas of history, culture, literature, civics, and virtue. Until these lessons are learned, there is little hope for reforming the system.

Notes

[1] Lisa Delpit, Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflicts in the Classroom (New York, NY: The New Press, 2006), 13.

[2]   Hillsdale College, “Sample Books From the Hillsdale K-12 Curriculum,” https://k12.hillsdale.edu/getmedia/84355dd1-7257-4cec-b848-5fe17bfed7b6/K12-Sample-Book-List-9-22.pdf

[3]   Diane Ravitch, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 9.