Ravitch Book: Who really calls the shots in public education?
September 23, 2010
By Margaret Markham
How can it be that at the start of the current school year once again New Mexico’s students ranked far short of the official
educational goal of adequate yearly progress (AYP)?
In fact, according to New Mexico’s Public Educational Department, only 22.1 percent had achieved that target.
Taxpayers may well ask: “How come?” And just which voices in recent decades have been most, influential in tipping the
scales in favor of one curriculum reform after another?
Just recently in Las Cruces the Regional Education initiative launched its first early college high school (ECHS-The Bridge), which offers particular college level classes in place of certain high school requirements.
While supported by public and government entities, and endorsed by sundry leaders in private business and ecnomic development, the innovative program has not been without critics. Opponents have qustioned such experimental use of sorely needed funding in the midst of the current economic crunch.
Yet far from being a 21st-centrury phenomenon, today’s schooling upheaval dates well back to half a century ago.
As chronicled in painful detail by Diane Ravitch in her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System,
(Basic Books), time and again it’s money that talked the loudest.
Ravitch, a former Assistant Secretary of Education, spares nobody, not even herself, in targeting those involved with the continuial shakeups in the nation’s school systems. She reminds readers that by the 1990s, “Elected officials of both parties came to accept as secular gossip that idea of testing and accountability would necessarily lead to better schools.” Not surprisingly, she notes, NCLB (No Child Left Behind) was approved in 2001 by “large bipartisan majorities in Congress.”
Though originally upbeat on the merits of NCLB, Ravitch unflinchingly admits her view changed as “the first four years of NCLB demonstrated” the opposite of her expectations. As an example she cites the dismal outcome of nationwide offers from some 2000 agencies to provide free after school tutoring to needy students, yet among those pupils “80 percent or more turned it down.”
Earlier at a 1988 gathering of The National Academy of Education, Ravitch recalls, a warning had been sounded that test-oriented curricula encompass “only a portion of the goals of elementary and secondary schooling.” To reach that testing goal, “such subjects as science, social studies, and the arts were pushed aside.”
Strictly test-oriented programs, Ravitch warns, lead to overlooking “what we mean when we speak of good education. Surely we have more in mind than just bare literacy and numeracy.”
Starting in 1967 with the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, more and more venture philanthropists have stepped into the education arena, Ravitch relates. Such tycoons created new organizations to handle donations, and eventually converged in support of reform strategies that mirrored their own experiences in acquiring huge fortunes. (Editor’s note: The Early College High School program is funded largely by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its partners. For more information, visit the web site, www.earlycolleges.org.)
This led to educators embracing concepts not familiar to the world of education, the author recalls. To her regret, more and more donors tend to treat monetary gifts to education as an investment “expected to produce measurable results, in the argot of business, a return on investment.”
Inevitably, she contends, “The offer of a multimillion dollar grant by a foundation is enough to cause most superintendents and school boards to drop everything and reorder their priorities.”
Consequently, “As their policy goals converged in the first decade of the twenty-first century, these foundations set the policy agenda not only for school districts, but also for states and even the U. S. Department of Education,” Ravitch warns.
Margaret Markham, an award-winning science writer and editor, has lived in Las Cruces for 30 years and last year was honored by the City of Las Cruces, which proclaimed Margaret Markham Day on Sept. 8, 2009 in recognition of “her life contributions and achievements.”
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