Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools

by Diane Ravitch

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2013 by Diane Ravitch

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House company, in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred Publishing Co., Inc. for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Plant a Radish,” lyrics by Harvey Schmidt, music by Tom Jones. Copyright © 1960, 1963 (renewed) by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt. Publication and allied rights assigned to Chappell & Co. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-35089-1

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-385-35088-4

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ravitch, Diane.

  Reign of error : the hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to America’s public schools / Diane Ravitch.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-385-35088-4

  1. Privatization in education—United States. 2. School choice—United States. 3. Education and state—United States. I. Title.

  LB2806.36.r38 2013

  379.3—dc23

  2013015275

  Cover design by Jason Booher

  v.3.1_r1

  This book is dedicated with love to Mary

  What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy. All that society has accomplished for itself is put, through the agency of the school, at the disposal of its future members. All its better thoughts of itself it hopes to realize through the new possibilities [are] thus opened to its future self.

  —JOHN DEWEY, 1907

  The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.

  —JOHN ADAMS, 1785

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1 Our Schools Are at Risk

  CHAPTER 2 The Context for Corporate Reform

  CHAPTER 3 Who Are the Corporate Reformers?

  CHAPTER 4 The Language of Corporate Reform

  CHAPTER 5 The Facts About Test Scores

  CHAPTER 6 The Facts About the Achievement Gap

  CHAPTER 7 The Facts About the International Test Scores

  CHAPTER 8 The Facts About High School Graduation Rates

  CHAPTER 9 The Facts About College Graduation Rates

  CHAPTER 10 How Poverty Affects Academic Achievement

  CHAPTER 11 The Facts About Teachers and Test Scores

  CHAPTER 12 Why Merit Pay Fails

  CHAPTER 13 Do Teachers Need Tenure and Seniority?

  CHAPTER 14 The Problem with Teach for America

  CHAPTER 15 The Mystery of Michelle Rhee

  CHAPTER 16 The Contradictions of Charters

  CHAPTER 17 Trouble in E-land

  CHAPTER 18 Parent Trigger, Parent Tricker

  CHAPTER 19 The Failure of Vouchers

  CHAPTER 20 Schools Don’t Improve if They Are Closed

  CHAPTER 21 Solutions: Start Here

  CHAPTER 22 Begin at the Beginning

  CHAPTER 23 The Early Years Count

  CHAPTER 24 The Essentials of a Good Education

  CHAPTER 25 Class Size Matters for Teaching and Learning

  CHAPTER 26 Make Charters Work for All

  CHAPTER 27 Wraparound Services Make a Difference

  CHAPTER 28 Measure Knowledge and Skills with Care

  CHAPTER 29 Strengthen the Profession

  CHAPTER 30 Protect Democratic Control of Public Schools

  CHAPTER 31 The Toxic Mix

  CHAPTER 32 Privatization of Public Education Is Wrong

  CHAPTER 33 Conclusion: The Pattern on the Rug

  Appendix

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Introduction

  The purpose of this book is to answer four questions.

  First, is American education in crisis?

  Second, is American education failing and declining?

  Third, what is the evidence for the reforms now being promoted by the federal government and adopted in many states?

  Fourth, what should we do to improve our schools and the lives of children?

  In this book, I show that the schools are in crisis because of persistent, orchestrated attacks on them and their teachers and principals, and attacks on the very principle of public responsibility for public education. These attacks create a false sense of crisis and serve the interests of those who want to privatize the public schools.

  My last book sought to show that many of the policies promoted by the Bush administration, the Obama administration, and the nation’s largest foundations had meager evidence to support them, and in some cases no evidence at all, and were likely to harm public education without improving the schools. In this book, I report additional evidence about the failure of the Bush-Obama “reforms.”

  In the spring of 2011, I decided to write this book as a result of a conversation with David Denby, who was writing an article about me that would eventually be published in The New Yorker magazine. At the time, we were riding in a car from New Jersey, where I had just given a lecture at the Education Law Center, to New York City, where we both live. Denby writes about American film and American culture, not education, so he came to the issues without any preconceptions. In addition to engaging in long discussions with me, following me to lectures, and reading my books, he interviewed critics of my work. He said to me, “Your critics say you are long on criticism but short on answers.”

  I said, “You have heard me lecture, and you know that is not true.”

  He suggested that I write a book to respond to the critics.

  So I did, and this is that book.

  I do not contend that the schools are fine just as they are. They are not. American education needs higher standards for those who enter the teaching profession. It needs higher standards for those who become principals and superintendents. It needs stronger and deeper curriculum in every subject. Schools need freedom from burdensome and intrusive regulations that undermine professional autonomy. They need the resources to meet the needs of the children they enroll. But they cannot improve if they are judged by flawed measures and continually at risk of closing because they do not meet an artificial goal created and imposed by legislators.

  Schools need stability, adequate resources, well-prepared and experienced educators, community support, and a clear vision of what good education is. The purpose of elementary and secondary education is to develop the minds and character of young children and adolescents and help them grow up to become healthy, knowledgeable, and competent citizens.

  I believe that privatizing our public schools is a risky and dangerous project. I believe it will hurt children, shatter c
ommunities, and damage our society. That is why I wrote this book.

  CHAPTER 1

  Our Schools Are at Risk

  In the early years of the twenty-first century, a bipartisan consensus arose about educational policy in the United States. Right and left, Democrats and Republicans, the leading members of our political class and our media elite seemed to agree: Public education is broken. Our students are not learning enough. Public schools are bad and getting worse. We are being beaten by other nations with higher test scores. Our abysmal public schools threaten not only the performance of our economy but our national security, our very survival as a nation. This crisis is so profound that half measures and tweaks will not suffice. Schools must be closed and large numbers of teachers fired. Anyone who doubts this is unaware of the dimensions of the crisis or has a vested interest in defending the status quo.

  Furthermore, according to this logic, now widely shared among policy makers and opinion shapers, blame must fall on the shoulders of teachers and principals. Where test scores are low, it is their fault. They should be held accountable for this educational catastrophe. They are responsible because they have become comfortable with the status quo of low expectations and low achievement, more interested in their pensions than in the children they teach.

  In response to this crisis, the reformers have a ready path for solving it. Since teachers are the problem, their job protections must be eliminated and teachers must be fired. Teachers’ unions must be opposed at every turn. The “hoops and hurdles” that limit entry into teaching must be eliminated. Teachers must be evaluated on the basis of their students’ test scores. Public schools must be evaluated on an “objective” basis, and when they are failing, they must be closed. Students must be given choices other than traditional public schools, such as charter schools, vouchers, and online schools.

  In Hollywood films and television documentaries, the battle lines are clearly drawn. Traditional public schools are bad; their supporters are apologists for the unions. Those who advocate for charter schools, virtual schooling, and “school choice” are reformers; their supporters insist they are championing the rights of minorities. They say they are leaders of the civil rights movement of our day.

  It is a compelling narrative, one that gives us easy villains and ready-made solutions. It appeals to values Americans have traditionally cherished—choice, freedom, optimism, and a latent distrust of government.

  There is only one problem with this narrative.

  It is wrong.

  Public education is not broken. It is not failing or declining. The diagnosis is wrong, and the solutions of the corporate reformers are wrong. Our urban schools are in trouble because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation. But public education as such is not “broken.” Public education is in a crisis only so far as society is and only so far as this new narrative of crisis has destabilized it. The solutions proposed by the self-proclaimed reformers have not worked as promised. They have failed even by their own most highly valued measure, which is test scores. At the same time, the reformers’ solutions have had a destructive impact on education as a whole.

  Far from being progressive, these changes strike at the heart of one of our nation’s most valued institutions. Liberals, progressives, well-meaning people have lent their support to a project that is antithetical to liberalism and progressivism. By supporting market-based “reforms,” they have allied themselves with those who seek to destroy public education. They are being used by those who have an implacable hostility toward the public sector. The transfer of public funds to private management and the creation of thousands of deregulated, unsupervised, and unaccountable schools have opened the public coffers to profiteering, fraud, and exploitation by large and small entrepreneurs.

  As a historian of American education, I have seen, studied, and written about waves of school reforms that came and went. But what is happening now is an astonishing development. It is not meant to reform public education but is a deliberate effort to replace public education with a privately managed, free-market system of schooling. Public education, established in America’s towns and villages in the mid-nineteenth century, born of advocacy and struggle, is now in jeopardy. This essential institution, responsible for producing a democratic citizenry and tasked with providing equality of educational opportunity, is at risk. Under the cover of “choice” and “freedom,” we may lose one of our society’s greatest resources, our public school system—a system whose doors are open to all.

  I was not always a critic of test-based accountability and choice. For many years, I too agreed that our public schools were in crisis. I wanted them to be far better. I worried about the content of the curriculum. I worried about low standards for students and for teachers. As a graduate of the public schools of Houston, I was an ambivalent supporter of school choice and certainly had no desire to replace public education with a voucherized, privately managed system of schools. In 1991–93, I served as assistant secretary of education in the administration of President George H. W. Bush, and I was in charge of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement. I was a strong supporter of standards, testing, and accountability. It was only after I saw the corrosive effects of No Child Left Behind that I reconsidered my long-held beliefs. In 2010, I published The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. In that book, I recanted my earlier support for what is now known as the “reform” agenda in education: high-stakes testing, test-based accountability, competition, and school choice (charters and vouchers). When the book appeared, it was widely reviewed, hailed by most experienced educators, and predictably scorned by advocates of these policies.

  Their most typical complaint was that while I was long on criticism, I offered no solutions. They, on the other hand, had solutions.

  I contend that their solutions are not working. Some are demonstrably wrong. Some, like charter schools, have potential if the profit motive were removed, and if the concept were redesigned to meet the needs of the communities served rather than the plans of entrepreneurs. It is far better to stop and think than to plunge ahead vigorously, doing what is not only ineffective but wrong. We must always be open to trying new ideas in the schools, but we should try them first on a small scale and gather evidence before applying and mandating new ideas nationwide. When evidence is lacking, we should not move forward with a sense of urgency. The reformers are putting the nation’s children on a train that is headed for a cliff. This is the right time to stand on the tracks, wave a lantern, and say, “Wait, this won’t work. Stop the train. Pick a different route.” But the reformers say, “That’s no solution. Full speed ahead,” aiming right for the cliff.

  What began as a movement for testing and accountability has turned into a privatization movement. President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, with its unrealistic goals, has fed the privatization frenzy. The overreliance on and misuse of testing and data have created a sense of crisis, lending credibility to claims that American public education is failing and in decline. Yes, we have problems, but those problems are concentrated where poverty and racial segregation are concentrated. The reformers say they care about poverty, but they do not address it other than to insist upon private management of the schools in urban districts; the reformers ignore racial segregation altogether, apparently accepting it as inevitable. Thus, they leave the root causes of low academic performance undisturbed. What began as a movement to “save minority children from failing schools” and narrow the achievement gap by privatizing their schools has not accomplished that goal, but the movement is undaunted. It is now intent on advancing into middle-income districts in the cities and suburbs as well. This is already happening.

  In this book, I will show why the reform agenda does not work, who is behind it, and how it is promoting the privatization of public education. I will then put forward my solutions, none of which is cheap or easy, none of which offers
a quick fix to complicated problems. I have no silver bullets—because none exist—but I have proposals based on evidence and experience.

  We know what works. What works are the very opportunities that advantaged families provide for their children. In homes with adequate resources, children get advantages that enable them to arrive in school healthy and ready to learn. Discerning, affluent parents demand schools with full curricula, experienced staffs, rich programs in the arts, libraries, well-maintained campuses, and small classes. As a society, we must do whatever is necessary to extend the same advantages to children who do not have them. Doing so will improve their ability to learn, enhance their chances for a good life, and strengthen our society.

  So that readers don’t have to wait until the later chapters of this book, here is a summary of my solutions to improve both schools and society. Schools and society are intertwined. The supporting research comes later in the book. Every one of these solutions works to improve the lives and academic outcomes of young people.

  Pregnant women should see a doctor early in their pregnancies and have regular care and good nutrition. Poor women who do not receive early and regular medical care are likely to have babies with developmental and cognitive problems.

  Children need prekindergarten classes that teach them how to socialize with others, how to listen and learn, how to communicate well, and how to care for themselves, while engaging in the joyful pursuit of play and learning that is appropriate to their age and development and that builds their background knowledge and vocabulary.

  Children in the early elementary grades need teachers who set age-appropriate goals. They should learn to read, write, calculate, and explore nature, and they should have plenty of time to sing and dance and draw and play and giggle. Classes in these grades should be small enough—ideally fewer than twenty—so that students get the individual attention they need. Testing in the early grades should be used sparingly, not to rank students, but diagnostically, to help determine what they know and what they still need to learn. Test scores should remain a private matter between parents and teachers, not shared with the district or the state for any individual student. The district or state may aggregate scores for entire schools but should not judge teachers or schools on the basis of these scores.