Diane Ravitch at Dillard

Last night Diane Ravitch gave an eloquent, powerful speech at Dillard University, sponsored by the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. I decided to go after having a rough day at work, hoping that there was an off-chance that something she could say would make me feel better about my life (which in that moment seemed, bluntly, bleak). Her speech was so inspiring and well-researched that I felt somewhat transformed, and vowed that I would at least share some of her speaking points here.

Education reform in America is one of those contentious points on which I disagree with most of the people I vote for, spend time with, and usually relate to. I agree wholeheartedly with Ravitch that the country's penchant for charter schools and programs like Teach for America is terribly dangerous. It has only been in my experience working for Teach for America that I have found myself looking very critically at the educational landscape, and I am afraid about what I see. America is privatizing education. What a drastic step backward.

Before copying my notes, two things: First, I don't hate all charter schools in the universe. The one I work at, for example, is my favorite place in New Orleans and contains my twenty-two favorite people in the world. I would fight tooth and nail to keep that school (and many schools like it ) open for years to come. It's a complicated issue, and I will be the first to admit that. Second, I am afraid I will be doing a disservice to the incomparable Ms. Ravitch if I merely copy my freehand notes on her wonderful speech. I highly, highly recommend taking the time to read her extraordinary review of Waiting for Superman -- a movie which I, for one, am boycotting.

Talking points from Diane Ravitch's "The Sad State of Education Reform"

• The public media has swooned over, as Naomi Klein puts it, "the shock doctrine" of education. Tis is the idea that everything is so completely terrible that nothing about education could possibly be fixed, and everything must be ripped apart and started again from scratch (just as Hurricane Katrina wiped the slate for education in New Orleans, which the country thinks was a godsend for public education). "People just like the idea of blowing things up, and don't ever think about fixing what was there," Ravitch said.
• Charter schools too regularly fall into the hands of big businesses. Three front page articles in the New York Times in the past six months have featured hedge fund moguls giving unprecedented amounts of money to charter schools. Billionaires treat their schools like a portfolio of investments, with the goal of privatization.
• Waiting for Superman contains scads of inacuracies and misconceptions, including distorted numbers (which Ravitch details superbly in her review, so I will not pour too much into them here). The movie claims that the problem with education has nothing to do with poverty, nothing to do with lack of resources, and everything to do with bad teachers never getting fired. Ravitch pointed out that the charters features in the movie have tremendous resources and funding. "Billionaires think that resources don't matter. Funny how resources never matter when you have lots of them," she said.
• No Child Left Behind asks all schools to turn their high-stakes testing scores around by 2014, or they will be shut down and everyone working there will be fired. Ravitch called this a "draconian punishment to meet an impossible task that no nation in the country has ever met in this timetable."
• Race to the Top asks states to compete for federal funding, rather than funding the children in the most high-needs areas. As a result, states will spend more money to fix their standards in order to meet RTT's rigorous expectations than they will ever receive if they win (one school in New York that Ravitch spoke about received only $26,000 -- not even a salary for one teacher -- after spending thousands to get it).
• When scores were finally reported for voucher schools in Milwaulkie, NAEP found that students made absolutely NO gains after being sent to a new school with a voucher.
• Charter schools break up communities and social networks, which are what keep so many schools alive.
• High Stakes tests are a totally inadequate way of judging teachers, because the measures are so completely flawed and the margin of error is so large. Because this is the ONLY way we rate teachers in this country, a fourteen-year teacher in Los Angeles who insistently took the most challenging students in his classroom, committed suicide after being publicly humiliated in the LA Times for his test scores.
• On the whole, charter schools do not outperform public schools. There are excellent charter schools and there are crappy charter schools, just like there are excellent public schools and terrible ones.
• Too often, charters succeed by exclusion. Disproportionate numbers of kids with special needs and disproportionate numbers of English Language Learners are admitted to charter schools, or are allowed to stay there.
• And so still, the lowest achieving kids are being pushed out and scraped away. And we continue to fail our children.

Unlike my notes here, Ravitch has decades of experience (and a political side-switch) under her belt, as well as oodles of research, to back up her theories. The power of the media (including our favorites) to usher charter schools into the spotlight makes ours a very unpopular position to be in. This makes it all more critical that we talk about it and research it and engage in debate on this topic. Education reform is the single most important issue in America today, and too many of us are blindly following the rhetoric of the richest few -- including, of course, the president. Mr. Obama, why are you so in favor of firing all our teachers? Leaders are not supposed to attack the people they are leading.