Scholar's School Reform U-Turn Shakes Up Debate

Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling.

Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups.
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Among the topics on which Dr. Ravitch has reversed her views is the main federal law on public schools, No Child Left Behind, which is up for a rewrite in coming weeks in Congress. She once supported it, but now says its requirements for testing in math and reading have squeezed vital subjects like history and art out of classrooms.
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In 2005, she said, a study she undertook of Pakistan’s weak and inequitable education system, dominated by private and religious institutions, convinced her that protecting the United States’ public schools was important to democracy.MORE AT

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/education/03ravitch.html?hp
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With her former advocacy of NCLB and charter schools, she did a lot of damage to public education, but her concern has always been providing a well-rounded, rich curriculum, and unlike many conservatives, she has been willing to change her mind when the FACTS showed that NCLB and charter schools were not the way to achieve that.

My personal opinion is that nothing will change until American culture as a whole places a high value on LEARNING rather than on getting job credentials.

She started out criticizing attitudes and approaches of those on the left. Most of those attitudes are still there. Throughout the '60s and '70s, and even the '80s, most of the failed polices weren't conservative.

So she helped lead an assault on "public education," which is metonymic for "liberal faculty's approaches to public education" because the facts were on her side: The great fads that were to produce a huge legion of highly educated high school graduates flopped fairly miserably.

Since then, it's become evident that her approach doesn't work. She's returned to defending public schools. The problem is, that many of those whose policies flopped before are now saying that she's on their side. That she's flipflopped. That she's finally understood that they were right all aling. Thing is, they're still wrong, but again--they see themselves as right, and there's just right and wrong. This attitude makes the entire debate not about kids, but about themselves.

That's wrong.

Now, flipflopping is when you change your mind for trivial reasons or for no reason at all. Looking at the facts and realizing that the facts say you're wrong and so a new approach is needed isn't flipflopping. It's shows a lack of insanity. As I've said before, when I looked at ed certification in '80 I read how the education theorists had finally realized everything from the '60s and '70s was wrong and they had a valid, scientific, proven way of teaching kids, they finally "got it"; then in the late '80s when I took some ed classes, I was told how education theorists had finally realized everything from the '70s and early '80s was wrong, they finally "got it"; now I'm taking ed classes and I'm told that everything from the '80s and '90s was pretty much wrong, but they've finally "got it". I don't see that they've "gotten it," but I know what to write in essays and on tests. So I pretend to buy into the group think.

Perhaps she can stake out a different path, avoiding the insane folk on the two established sides. Perhaps not. There is a group of educator educators trying different things, but they lack cohesion because they're not a coherence group. Personally, I think most those on the two sides are asking precisely the wrong questions: Some people are asking the right questions and coming up with reasonable answers, but there are established constituencies on both sides still thinking in terms of teachers or content, open-ended versus over-determined, low-accountability vs high accountability. All claim to have the kids' interests at heart, all believe that they do, but when push comes to shove it's about being right.

To the extent there is a public school system (the way they're currently set up) in any one place the results will suck if there's enough variation, or if there are political forces preventing it from working. The community I'm in has sucky educational outcomes; up the road the same policies and procedures in the same school district yield great results. Another nearby district is trying to reset policies for the group with sucky outcomes--with the result being that improvement by the groups that formerly did well has stalled. You can't treat different communities the same, but when you're forced to treat kids in too individualistic a fashion you atomize instructional procedures and time and make the entire enterprise unworkable. You can't teach a monolithic set of facts, but if you factionalize the content too much you again don't have a single system. You can't be too concerned with disparate impact in having differentiated approaches if the effect of avoiding that yields significant and long-term disparate impact in outcome.