First thoughts about Diane Ravitch's changes of heart on school reform

I'm planning to purchase Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System as soon as possible - it sounds like a fascinating and heartfelt book about a great educator's rethinking of long-held positions on school reform. The reviews have been mostly glowing. (For a kind but critical review, check out Chester Finn's take in Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/02/diane-ravitch-education-schools-opinions-book-reviews-chester-e-finn-jr.html)

However, the tone of many of the stories about Ravitch's change of heart suggest to me that the politicization of education and school reform has become a serious problem. We need to refocus on whether a particular idea or a particular reform will strengthen student outcomes, and we should be less concerned about whether the proposal comes from the left or the right of the political spectrum.

School reform is not just another political issue: it is an issue that directly affects the lives of millions of students and their communities. It affects the social and economic future of society and the health of democracy.

Those who wade into these debates bear an especially heavy burden, and to handle that burden responsibly, we should read widely and listen with an open mind to ideas and proposals from as many perspectives as possible.

It seems to me that there may be more common ground than the current political lines-in-the-sand suggest. For instance, the progressive vision of small, personal, relationship-driven schools (advocated most prominently by Deborah Meier) seems more compatible with a flexible and choice-driven school structure than with large-scale, one-size-fits-all models of schooling.

Above all, perhaps, our education policy debates might become more sane if we stood back for a moment from debates about means - how and by whom education services are to be delivered (by public or private schools, charter schools, virtual schools, home-based schools, etc.) - and agreed first and foremost that educational outcomes (what knowledge, skills, habits, and dispositions students walk away with at the conclusion of their schooling) are what matters most.

It seems silly and shortsighted to pick a fight with a school that is truly serving its students and community well just because it is a particular type of school. Likewise, it seems wrong to stand up against any and all reform measures that target schools that are clearly not serving their students and community well simply because one is concerned about the broader implications of the reform or the political affiliation of those who are promoting the reform.

The simple reality is that there are excellent public, private, charter, virtual, and home-based schools, and there are extremely poor public, private, charter, virtual, and home-based schools. The means of schooling are less important than the outcomes.

(Image sources: Education Week (www.edweek.org) and Barnes & Noble (www.bn.com)).

Further reading:

Diane Ravitch's homepage: http://www.dianeravitch.com/

Diane Viadero, "In New Book, Ravitch Recants Long-Held Beliefs," Edweek.org, 3/5/10.

Steve Inskeep, "Former 'No Child Left Behind' Advocate Turns Critic," NPR.org, 3/2/10.

Chester E. Finn, "School's Out: On Diane Ravitch's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," Forbes.com, 3/3/10.

Michael W. McConnell on religion and educational choice

Michael W. McConnell is Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, a former federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, and a conservative scholar of Constitutional Law. He is also a supporter of school vouchers and choice. Here are his thoughts on the matter, as expressed in the 1991 University of Chicago Legal Forum:

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Despite insistent demands by minority groups, principally Catholics, but including Jews, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, for equal funding for their free schools, the common school movement soon achieved a monopoly of public funding. Many states even adopted constitutional provisions barring state funding of religious schools, and a federal constitutional amendment to that effect was narrowly defeated in Congress. The opposition to particularistic private schools grew to the extent that, in the early twentieth century, some states passed laws forbidding the education of children in languages other than English and banning private schools altogether. These efforts were promptly overturned by the Supreme Court, on the ground that "[t]he fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only." (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925)
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The leading elementary and secondary school textbooks virtually neglect any mention of religious influences or ideas in history, ethics, or social studies. Thus, the "public values" inculcated by the public schools are not, in fact, the values held by the large majority of the American public, but the values held by a secular minority.
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It is not possible, practically or theoretically, for public schools to be "neutral" with respect to contentious questions of morality, politics, and religion. The more the school attempts to be evenhanded, the more it will appear to endorse a position of relativism, or worse, cynicism.
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No shifts in constitutional doctrine governing the conduct of the public schools can solve this problem, because it inheres in the nature of things. The Supreme Court can alter the character of public education, making it more religious or more secular, but it cannot make public education genuinely more pluralistic. A common school is a common school. That is its blessing and its curse.
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While fears of church-state constitutional problems are often cited by opponents of educational choice, those fears are groundless. Whatever may be the flaws in the educational choice idea, it should be debated on its merits and not rejected on spurious constitutional grounds. In fact, far from offending the First Amendment, an educational choice plan is much more consistent with the pluralistic vision of the First Amendment than is granting secular schools a monopoly of public funds.
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The common school movement now teaches our children, unintentionally, to be value-less, culture-less, root-less, and religion-less. It can no longer achieve its crowning purpose of providing a unifying moral culture in the face of our many differences.

Michael W. McConnell
--"Multiculturalism, Majoritarianism, and Educational Choice: What Does Our Constitutional Tradition Have to Say?," University of Chicago Legal Forum 1991.

(Ed. note: This post originally appeared on my general blog in June 2008.)

School finance and the vouchers debate

School Finance and the Vouchers Debate

The slideshow above begins with a description of how U.S. public and private schools are financed and the enormous disparities between rich and poor public schools, then describes the various school choice policies that have been proposed to rectify these disparities. Finally, I examine one proposed reform - school vouchers - in depth, presenting the main arguments for and against vouchers and linking to both pro-voucher and anti-voucher resources.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Consenting to a challenging curriculum

The biggest problem with school voucher programs and other policy arrangements that call for a greater role for private schools at the K-12 level is that private schools can control who they admit. Entry restrictions through academic testing or high tuition bills allow many private schools to ensure their own success by restricting access to those students most likely to succeed. Such restrictions arguably subvert one of the main roles of education in a democracy - that is, K-12 education is supposed to provide excellent opportunities for all students regardless of the relative wealth and status of their homes and communities.

Of course, no one would argue that American public education, as it is currently organized, even approaches that ideal; but voucher programs that give public funds to schools that can restrict access to incoming students deemed unlikely to succeed cannot be a serious vehicle for reducing inequality of opportunity.

There may, however, be a way to introduce more choice and competition into the K-12 system (a conservative goal) while promoting equal educational opportunity for disadvantaged students (a liberal goal). Voucher and charter policies, where they are introduced, should require schools to accept applicants on the basis of lotteries rather than on the basis of interviews and test scores as a condition for receiving public funds. Differentiation between schools needs to be based on factors other than who gets in; curricula can be different, allocation of resources can be different, teacher pay can be different, and the aims of education (i.e., vocational preparation versus college preparation) can be different. But publicly-financed schools should not differentiate themselves by restricting access.

Over at the Noble Street College Prep network of charter schools in Chicago, students are admitted regardless of their previously demonstrated academic capabilities - just as they are in most public schools. However, students and their parents must consciously choose to attend a Noble Street school, accepting a longer school day, a longer school year, and college-level homework loads as a consequence. Incoming students and their parents must agree to make college admission the overriding goal of their high school years.

The consequence? Over 85% of Noble Street College Prep graduates attend college.

It is remarkable what students can achieve when they are asked to consent to getting a great education as a condition of high school admission. Students' consent to hard work - rather than their scores on a high-stakes test - becomes the method by which students are put on a college-prep track.

Is this the answer to the age-old debate about "tracking" students? Can it be replicated on a larger scale? I wonder whether providing middle-school students and their parents with extensive information about career paths, wage differences between jobs that require a college education and those that do not, and similar data and then asking them to place themselves in a vocational track or college-prep track might improve students' high school experiences and the likelihood that they will reach their educational goals.