Public schools? They’re fine.
Teachers who can’t be fired? No problem at all.
Our international competitiveness in education? Nothing to worry about.
Too many kids dropping out of high school? It’s a myth. And anyway, some kids are just poor, hence doomed, so what are schools supposed to do about that?
Get ready for the world’s longest excuse note: Diane Ravitch’s new book “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to Public Schools.” Only this note is from the teachers’ unions (who have paid Ravitch for her flackery) to you.
The dog ate your child’s education.
Ravitch’s book purports to be a point-by-point destruction of the arguments for school reform, (a word she cloaks in scare quotes), choice and competition. She thinks that the local monopoly stranglehold of the average union-run public school is somehow a good thing and that parental choice and competition are bad.
The book veers between argument and rant. Ravitch seems scarcely able to stop sputtering out meaningless and irrelevant buzzwords that she hopes will inspire ill will towards school choice. Again and again — hundreds of times — she tosses out words meant to stir up irrational hatred. I refer to words like “privatization” (which no one is proposing), “entrepreneurs,” “corporations,” “profits” and (most hilariously) “creationism,” which she claims is one of the hidden agendas of school reformists.
Yet school reform and charter schools (which are generally just public schools freed from union red tape) are among the few political solutions floating around that are genuinely bipartisan.
A chapter on tenure is particularly instructive about Ravitch’s style. She says “tenure means due process. There is no ironclad tenure for teachers.”
There isn’t?
Before the recent, mild tenure reforms in New York City, 97 percent of teachers were granted tenure in 2007. In the three years up to 2010, only 88 teachers out of about 80,000 city teachers were fired for any reason.
That’s one-tenth of 1 percent. Sounds fairly ironclad to me, but Ravitch simply pretends such figures don’t exist. What other profession is so protective of poor performers?
Getting rid of tenure is, to Ravitch, a secret plot hatched by school Savonarolas who want to burn all the interesting books.
If teachers don’t have tenure, writes Ravitch, “They will think twice before assigning a novel that any parent might find offensive, such as Mark Twain’s ‘Huckleberry Finn’ or Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ or the Harry Potter books or a novel by John Steinbeck.”
So Mike Bloomberg, who has said his goal is to end teacher tenure, is a sort of Manchurian Candidate secretly directed by fundamentalist who think Harry Potter is teaching our kids to be Satanists?
Ravitch told The New Yorker that without tenure, “There will be huge parts of this country where evolution will never again be taught.”
Sure.
Charter-school backers like Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the guy who directed “An Inconvenient Truth” — they’re all closet creationists using school choice as a Trojan Horse to sneak their evangelical Christian views inside the castle walls.
Other Ravitch critics espouse their views in the Bible Belt newsletter The New Republic (“Ravitch’s use of evidence to support her new positions is often dubious, selective, and inconsistent”) or the fundamentalist outpost Time magazine (“Aside from improving curriculum, she does not have a reform agenda or alternatives of her own”).
Ravitch thinks it’s just fine that the teaching profession pays according to seniority and irrelevant outside credentials rather than skill. So what if studies show that whether your teacher has a master’s degree has nothing to do with whether she can teach?
“This is one of those instances where the findings of economists do not concur with the wisdom of teachers,” she writes.
So if a scientific study conflicts with teacher “wisdom,” we should simply toss out the former and defer to the latter. Why bother doing any educational studies whatsoever if that’s the case? Instead we could just take a poll of “teacher wisdom” made up of questions like, “Would you rather have to prove your worth like virtually every other worker in America, or would you prefer to have guaranteed employment for life?”
Public schools are supposed to serve the interests of students and their families, not teachers.
Here’s a reform agenda: Stanford economist Eric Hanushek has calculated that if we could raise our overall education standard to that of Canada (a pretty high bar — Canada ranks just below Massachusetts, which is the No. 1 US state in education performance), that one factor would increase the pay of US workers by 20 percent (in inflation-adjusted dollars) over the next 80 years.
That windfall would mean a lot less pressure on liberal social programs, or on defense cuts, or on the upward trajectory of tax rates, or however you want to envision it.
See the bipartisan appeal here?
Hanushek has further shown that if we replaced the bottom 5 percent to 8 percent of teachers with merely average ones — precisely the kind of reform teachers unions hate and make impossible via tenure regulations — we could catch up to Canada in the rankings charts.
If there are 35 teachers in a school, that means telling two or three of them to find another line of work.
Ravitch questions the worth of testing teachers, but is there a principal in this country who couldn’t identify a couple of teachers she’d gladly unload if it weren’t for tenure?
At times, Ravitch, a former neoconservative who used to say the exact opposite of everything she says now (the amusing Twitter feed “Not Diane Ravitch” is a fount of quotations from her earlier, sensible self) sounds like a hair-shirt wearing zealot who has to scourge herself to punish any dissent from teachers’ union dogma.
Even retroactively.
“Was I weak? Yes,” she told The New Yorker about her choice to send her kids to private schools. Sure, she it would have been a much stronger move to sacrifice her sons’ education for the sake of making a political point.
Today she delivers tub-thumping anti-reform speeches to the assembled teachers’ union faithful. At one union rally in Washington, she was introduced with these words: “Like Britney and Cher and Gaga, in the education world, all you need to say is ‘Diane.’ ”
Ravitch certainly can be gaga.
New Yorker writer David Denby said that when he left her apartment after an interview, she sent him 16 emails in the 45 minutes it took him to get home.
After the Newtown Massacre, she wrote, in a bizarre nonsequitur, “Let us hope [Connecticut] Governor Malloy learned something these past few days about the role of public schools in their communities. Newtown does not need a charter school. What it needs now is healing. Not competition, not division, but a community coming together to help one another. Together. Not competing.”
The New Republic suggested a possible motive for her political conversion from conservatism to her current belief that even President Obama is a tool of the nefarious “corporate reformers.”
She began publicly attacking then-New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein (currently the CEO of Amplify, which like The Post is a News Corp. company) shortly after her girlfriend Mary Butz, a longtime school principal, failed to get a job heading up a New York City principals-training program.
According to The New Republic, Ravitch “aggressively lobbied Klein to hire Butz to lead the new program — and reacted with anger when he didn’t.” (Ravitch denied this, telling TNR that she merely “urged Klein to call upon Butz for her deep knowledge and experience,” the magazine stated).
After that, Ravitch would then “obsessively turn every conversation toward her grievances with Klein” as he cleared the way for hundreds of charter schools, a school reformer told the magazine.
Her grievance-laden book simply ignores facts that teachers unions would prefer you not to know.
Though there is nothing magical about charter schools that guarantees their success, the good ones have achieved such spectacular results that it would be gross educational malpractice to ignore them.
A Stanford study of New York City charter schools found that 50 percent of them outperformed the union-run public schools, as against 16 percent that did worse.
Twenty-two of the top 25 public schools in the state are now city schools (which boasted zero of the top 25 before Mayor Bloomberg jump-started the charter movement). Of those 22, 18 are schools of choice (such as charters and magnet schools) instead of geographically zoned ones. In 2002, the city had 9 percent of the state’s top-ranked schools and 62 percent of the lowest-ranked. Those numbers are now up to 22 percent on the high end and down to 30 percent on the low end.
What would happen to all those charter students if Ravitch destroyed the charter movement in the name of “community,” i.e. local monopolies?
Answer: More fragmentation of the community. More separation of rich and poor, white and black.
We already have “privatized” education in a sense: Your child’s education is simply part of the price of your home, which costs more in a good school district than it would in a neighboring one where the school is a dropout factory. Charters are severing that link between the value of your home and the value of your kid’s education.
Poor kids may never achieve at the level of rich kids, but poverty is no excuse for defending the status quo of terrible schools in the least affluent neighborhoods. Rich people already have school choice — they can move to another neighborhood — and the indigent ought to have more options than the citizens of some thug dictatorship where there’s only one name on the ballot.
“Class Warfare” author and reformist Steven Brill has compared Ravitch to the amoral tobacco lobbyist in “Thank You For Smoking.”
Education Secretary Duncan has said, “Diane Ravitch is in denial and she is insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving her wrong every day.” Bloomberg View columnist Jonathan Alter wrote that she “uses phony empiricism to rationalize almost every tired argument offered by teachers unions.”
Undeterred, Ravitch keeps the excuses coming:
* “We would know more if the reformers took over an entire low-performing district, like Newark or Detroit.” They’d love to, but guess who is blocking them?
* “The four-year graduation rate is one way to measure graduation rates, but it is not the only way. Many young people take longer than four years to earn a high school diploma.” As if kids who take six years to graduate high school have it made.
* “Poor children . . . are more likely to be hungry or suffer from anemia because of a poor diet.” So America’s new crop of spherical kids are flunking out because they’re . . . underfed? Those hulking Augustus Gloops you see rolling off to school every morning are actually spindly Oliver Twists?
I don’t think Ravitch is listening to them. What these kids are saying is, “Please sir, I want some more . . . education.”