Education scholar Diane Ravitch has been making headlines (including a mention on Max Brantley’s blog) with a new book in which she reverses what had been long-held beliefs in favor of competition and choice in education. Now she says that schools should be like families:

“There should not be an education marketplace, there should not be competition,” Ravitch says. “Schools operate fundamentally — or should operate — like families. The fundamental principle by which education proceeds is collaboration. Teachers are supposed to share what works; schools are supposed to get together and talk about what’s [been successful] for them. They’re not supposed to hide their trade secrets and have a survival of the fittest competition with the school down the block.”

But without competition — in the sense of there being a wide variety of different schools (charter schools, private schools, etc.) — there’s less room for experimentation and diversity, and hence less possibility that different schools will find out what works.

Moreover, one of the strongest rationales for educational competition is that “what works” isn’t the same for different children — some children need more of a focus on the academic basics, some are more interested in the arts, some are more interested in a science and math-based curriculum, some want more structure while some thrive with less direct guidance, some do well in a large school that has lots of different clubs and activities while others get lost in the crowd.  No one school can be everything to every child.

The NPR story linked above also has an excerpt from Ravitch’s book, in which she describes how she came to oppose the No Child Left Behind Act:

My support for NCLB remained strong until November 30, 2006. I can pinpoint the date exactly because that was the day I realized that NCLB was a failure. I went to a conference at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. — a well-respected conservative think tank — to hear a dozen or so scholars present their analyses of NCLB’s remedies. . . .

Choice was not working, they all agreed. The scholars presented persuasive evidence that only a tiny percentage of eligible students were asking to transfer to better schools. . . .

As I listened to the day’s discussion, it became clear that NCLB’s remedies were not working. Students were offered the choice to go to another school, and they weren’t accepting the offer.

So the whole point here is that very few students took the opportunity to choose a different public school farther from their home. “Choice” was not working, because there wasn’t enough of it.

But Ravitch immediately flips the rationale for opposing choice:

I began to question ideas that I once embraced, such as choice and accountability, that were central to NCLB. As time went by, my doubts multiplied. I came to realize that the sanctions embedded in NCLB were, in fact, not only ineffective but certain to contribute to the privatization of large chunks of public education.

As excerpted by NPR, Ravitch’s book doesn’t seem to make sense. She criticizes NCLB’s choice provisions both for having no effect (because so few students avail themselves of choice) and for privatizing “large chunks of public education.”