Diane Ravitch: Why Education Disruption Is Losing

Her switch from supporter of modern education reform to critic quickly made her the most visible member of the resistance to ed reform policies. Her blog, where she posts many times every day, has become a veritable Rick's Cafe; spend enough time there, and you will meet most of the important figures of the resistance. Nobody has done more to amplify the voices of parents, teachers and activists than Ravitch.

You can also meet many of these folks in Ravitch's new book Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America's Public Schools. The book is a history of the modern education reform movement told from the point of view of the people who have stood up to protect public education from attempts to disrupt and dismantle it. Ravitch also explains why, in her view, those resistors are winning.

This is the story of the last decade of public education in this country. It's a far-ranging story that covers every corner of the nation and dozens of different issues. It's the story of people with great power and people who would seem at first glance to have no power at all. Ravitch is telling a saga here that is broad in scope and rich in detail. Up until now, nobody has managed to capture the full breadth and depth of the battle over the next direction for U.S. public education, but Ravitch renders the complex and multi-character clear and comprehensible without sacrificing the full scope of what's been happening.

Ravitch details how the folks she dubs the Disruptors first codified their ideas into law with No Child Left Behind and went on to push a vision of a test-and-punish regime, privately owned and operated schools, and circumventing democratic processes. The disruption movement has given us charter schools, high stakes testing, and the de-professionalization of teaching. It has used the real problems of inequity and underserved communities to justify false solutions.

After laying out the background of modern ed reform, Ravitch looks at some of the people who have been part of the resistance to it (full disclosure: I appear in one paragraph). She lays out the stories of many of the debates over education chapter by chapter. She presents the expert critiques of high stakes testing and tells the stories of successful resistance to testing, from New York to Seattle. She talks about what science says about using rewards and punishments to improve performance, and how that knowledge has been ignored as education reform has tried to enforce standardization while favoring Taylor over Deming. She talks about how liberals were convinced to join what was fundamentally a conservative movement. She deconstructs the New Orleans and Florida education "miracles." She looks at the huge injection of dark money in ballot issues from Denver to Massachusetts. She looks at the fiasco that is Common Core. She details the accomplishments of the recent "education spring." And she details some of the most egregious scams and abuses under deregulated school choice programs.

If you have followed the ed policy debates of the last decade, there is still much to learn here, both from the details and the context of the stories. If you have not paid much attention, this is a tremendous introduction to the tale of how some wealthy, powerful people tried to alter the nature of public education, and how a wide cross-section of Americans stood up in that Goliath's path. Some of the stories you'll find in the book will amaze you in a "how can that even be legal" way, but some will remind you that ordinary folks really can make a difference.

Fans of education reform will undoubtedly disagree with some of Ravitch's conclusions and analysis. That's fine. What's history without some debate. This book still provides the most complete, compact, detail-filled narrative of what has been happening to U.S. education since the Reagan administration release A Nation At Risk.