Wall Street Journal Book Review by Trevor Butterworth

[johnkarls]

.
Wall Street Journal – 9/20/2013


'Reign of Error' by Diane Ravitch
In the debates over reforming public schools and promoting privatization, there's precious little middle ground.
By Trevor Butterworth - a frequent contributor to Newsweek and editor at large for STATS.org


We are, by now, familiar with the sense of a crisis in American education. Where America's public schools once helped to power the economy, they now drag the country down: groves of apathy, stripped of rigor, suffocated by local and federal bureaucracy and self-serving unions. To Diane Ravitch, perhaps America's best-known educational historian, the rot was there from the beginning: In books such as 2000's "Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms," Ms. Ravitch portrayed public schools as playgrounds of progressive-education theorists, frenemies of promise, who loosened children from the grip of knowledge and lowered educational expectations. She became one the most passionate critics of American education, a mixture of W.B. Yeats and a Marine Corps drill sergeant, and an inspiration for supporters of school reform, school choice and rigorous testing—ideals enshrined in No Child Left Behind, the George W. Bush administration's signature educational initiative, which was built with committed bipartisan support.

And then, having diagnosed a crisis and marched the country up the hill of school reform, Ms. Ravitch had second thoughts: None of this is working, she said; NCLB has turned out to be a mess; accountability, whether of teachers or children, was implemented with all the finesse of a Viking raid on a monastery; and charter schools don't deliver children into the promised land of innovation and effectiveness. Let's all march back down again.

"Reign of Error" ostensibly takes up the question that her previous book—2010's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System"—failed to address: What should we be doing about American education and what should we avoid doing? Yet much time is expended on restating the same themes, without the humility that accompanied having to originally explain why she had soured on a movement she had done so much to push forward. Ms. Ravitch is no longer writing to explain herself. She is writing for victory, which means crushing a phalanx of enemies, real and imagined.

If there is a crisis in American education, Ms. Ravitch writes, it is only "because of persistent, orchestrated attacks" on teachers and principals. "These attacks," she writes, "create a false sense of crisis and serve the interests of those who want to privatize the public schools." In Ms. Ravitch's telling, these interests represent not reform but a new status quo in education, one created by a vast bipartisan alliance encompassing everyone from the American Legislative Exchange Council to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal to the Bezos Foundation, from the Hoover Institution to Hollywood. At the top of the pyramid sit Bill and Melinda Gates, who make the Koch brothers look like amateurs at advocacy funding. Because there is no crisis in American education, in Ms. Ravitch's view, all these people are destroying the public-school system over an illusion.