The Daily Howler Takes Apart a Ravitch Op-Ed
Posted by SBuck | Education | April 17, 2010
Over at The Daily Howler, Bob Somerby has a multi-part essay dissecting one of Diane Ravitch’s op-eds discussing her policy prescriptions for replacing testing and choice. See here, here, and here.
He’s quite scathing. Here’s a portion from the first essay, responding to Ravitch’s claim that states should help out low-performing schools by sending in “inspection teams”:
According to Ravitch, “every state should have inspection teams [which] diagnose what is wrong in these schools.” (As she ends, another Gardnerism: “Whatever the cause of low performance, the inspection team should create a plan to improve the school.”) But please note: As Ravitch has explained in her previous paragraph, the thing that is “wrong” with these schools will routinely involve matters of demographics: Often, the children in these schools will come from low-income, low-literacy, non-English speaking backgrounds. Question: When those “inspection teams” survey these types of schools, what type of “plan” should they create? In more than 800 words, Ravitch makes only the most Gardeneristic attempts to answer this question. (Extra bilingual staff! An after-school program! And even this: “Other resources!”)Surely, no one but an expert would think of solutions like those. What should teachers of delightful, deserving low-income kids do to address their academic problems? In a familiar bit of evasion, Ravitch doesn’t say.
. . . After all these years—after all these decades—we find this type of column repellent. We’ve been reading columns like this for forty years—columns in which “educational experts” play the Gardner role, pretending that they have ideas for ways to help low-income kids. How should we help low-income kids? Under the previous Ravitch regime—the regime built around accountability and standards—the answer to this was fairly simple: We should threaten teachers with getting fired, and they will somehow magically figure how to get test scores up. In this new regime by Ravitch, the solution is no less magical. We’re now supposed to send “inspections teams” into these schools, and they will come up with a plan! But what sorts of proposals will be in their plans? Like “educational experts” of time immemorial, Ravitch doesn’t much say. And by the way: The various states simply don’t have such “inspections teams”—teams can somehow magically say how a low-income school can get right. These teams of savants simply don’t exist—except as a novelistic devise to let Ravitch continue to pose as an expert.
We’re certain that Ravitch is well-intentioned. But at some point in time, work like this becomes repellent. Unhelpful too are the liberal saps who line up to drink this Gardneresque stew. Also unhelpful: The familiar data-spinning found at the start of Ravitch’s piece. But when the lives of low-income kids are at stake, work like this—cheered on by liberals—has been the norm for years.
This week
