{"id":6733,"date":"2013-09-25T08:00:09","date_gmt":"2013-09-25T12:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=6733"},"modified":"2013-09-24T22:27:51","modified_gmt":"2013-09-25T02:27:51","slug":"on-ravitch-reign-of-error","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=6733","title":{"rendered":"On Ravitch, Reign of Error"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bottom line: Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error<\/em> captures the bulk of concerns that critics voice about the current wave of American school reform. The primary audience includes teachers, and others who hold views similar to Ravitch’s. It also is useful as a quick reference guide to the arguments by reform critics, as most of the chapters address the issues in an accessible way. There are important omissions, and the broad scope of the book leads to some interesting flaws at times. It should be useful for a course on contemporary education politics if combined with other sources, especially those with significantly different perspectives. <\/p>\n

Four years after she published the best-seller\u00a0The Death and Life of the Great American School System<\/em>, Diane Ravitch has a new book on school reform, organized for the most part in short chapters, each focusing on a separate topic. Between the first four chapters and the last two, each chapter either addresses what Ravitch considers a false myth in education reform rhetoric or proposes a solution to the problems of American schools. For those who have followed the public debates over American education policy over the past few years, her views should not be surprising, and they track the views of other writers skeptical of education reform. As\u00a0David Berliner and Bruce Biddle<\/a>\u00a0did almost 20 years ago, she argues that the public rhetoric of school failure is a distortion of the record that underestimates the successes of public schools and misidentifies their problems. As Bruce Baker argues on his blog<\/a>, Ravitch thinks the claims made for both charter schools and value-added measures of achievement are overblown. She argues that school reformers assume that schools can do more to address poverty than is realistic, that accountability policies encourage narrowing of the curriculum and teaching to the test, that vouchers have accumulated no significant evidence of effectiveness, that “virtual charter schools” are a ripoff of taxpayers, and that there are more effective policy solutions that are far from test-based accountability and “school choice” policies: social services for poor families, early childhood education, protecting the autonomy of teachers and elected school boards, reducing class sizes, eliminating for-profit companies and chains from operating charter schools, and aggressively fighting racial and socioeconomic segregation in schools. None of this will be a surprise to those who follow American education policy debates, and perhaps the greatest achievement of the book is that given the chaos of those debates, Ravitch has collected these arguments in a single volume and explained the perspective of reform critics in a clear and accessible fashion.<\/p>\n

How accurate is her presentation?<\/p>\n