By John Thompson.

As we wait for Diane Ravitch’s next, comprehensive masterpiece, Slaying Goliath, a new anthology, The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch, offers a unique opportunity to assess the quality and accuracy of both Ravitch’s and the corporate school reformers’ analyses of school improvement. Of course, Ravitch’s experience in education research and politics gave her advantages in understanding policy complexities over the non-educators who imposed test-driven, accountability-driven policies on the nation’s schools. On the other hand, it was the edu-philanthropists’ untested opinions that became the laws of almost all of the states, so they should have been just as rigorous as Ravitch in studying the facts of life in our nation’s diverse schools.

Ravitch came to the school reform wars with a reputation as a thorough, balanced scholar, with close ties to conservative reformers. She had been an Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education, and a member of the National Assessment of Educational Progress Board (NAEP), and worked with policy analysts with the Fordham Institute, the Brookings Institution, and other think tanks.  Ravitch also had a long career as an education historian.  In contrast to corporate reformers who demanded schools and systems where “everyone is on the same page,” Ravitch believed, “Historians understand that debate and dissent are part of the work of understanding history.”

Ravitch explained, “There is not one truth, but on the other hand, you can’t just make up facts and narratives, hire a fancy PR firm, and rewrite history to suit yourself.”   She said, “One of the things that a historian tries to do is to correct the record.” So, it is not surprising that an accountability audit of Ravitch’s positions during the contemporary school reform era would compare so favorably with those of inexperienced venture philanthropists, as well as the non-educators who mandated top-down management of America’s schools. And, as Ravitch also wrote about the public relations spin funded by the Billionaires Boys Club, “When people say things again and again, even though these things are not true, it is the job of the historian to tell the truth.”

To paraphrase Ravitch, if today’s corporate reformers still disagree on the evidence, they should look anew at The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch, and “they should put their facts on the table too.”

The anthology begins with Ravitch’s 2010 writings, which was a time when a bipartisan collection of conservative, liberal, and neoliberal reformers were acknowledging the failure of No Child Left Behind. Even its co-author, Rep. George Miller (D), admitted that NCLB “may be the most negative brand in America.” By the time Barack Obama became president, even Bill Clinton acknowledged NCLB was a “train wreck,” and President Obama would soon criticize the teaching to the test that his policies promoted. Sadly, Obama, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and billionaires like Bill Gates, chose to double-down on NCLB’s most destructive policies, where many teachers were required to “teach to the test, or be rated ineffective and be fired.”

Even those who remained committed to high stakes testing, reward and punish, and competition-driven experiments, and who reacted angrily to Ravitch’s leadership of educators and parents’ resistance to NCLB, would be hard-pressed to find errors in the positions she has meticulously laid out. It’s hard to see how they would challenge Ravitch’s statement:

This is what we got from NCLB: score inflation, cheating, narrowing the curriculum, obsession with test scores, more time devoted to testing, less time for the arts, physical education, history, civics, play, and anything else that was not tested. Among other consequences: demoralization of teachers, a national teacher shortage, more money for testing companies, and less money for teachers and class size reduction.

Ravitch describes “a nightmare for American schools,” she reported, “We also got a load of “reforms” that had no evidence to support them, such as closing schools, firing teachers and principals because of low scores, handing schools with low scores over to charter operators or the state.”

In retrospect, NCLB was, “The Worst Federal Education Law Ever Passed.” Its accountability provisions produced “graduates who were drilled regularly on the basic skills but were often ignorant about almost everything else.”  Attempts to promote “Deeper Learning” and the nurturing of interpersonal skills interpersonal skills were abandoned.

Many states gambled on charters raising test scores but the the main result was “competition, and chaos.” By 2010, it should have been clear that Ravitch was correct in explaining, “Public schools are not chain stores that can be closed and opened at will … They are, and should be vital community institutions, not transient agencies that come and go as test scores rise and fall.”

Having witnessed the tragedy of NCLB for high-challenge schools, I retained some hope that the Obama administration would rethink the punitive nature of NCLB, but it did the opposite. As a result, the damage of NCLB, combined with the subsequent doubling down by Arne Duncan and edu-philanthropists on the most punitive form of high stakes testing, led to a disaster which accelerated the exodus of teachers from the profession.

Ravitch writes:

NCLB, in turn, led to its ugly spawn, Race to the Top, which was even meaner and more punitive than NCLB. Race to the Top turned up the heat on test scores, making them the measure of teacher quality despite decades of social science that refuted that policy. More teachers and principals were fired, more public schools were closed, enrollments in professional education programs plummeted across the country.

Then, Ravitch nails the main point:

NCLB was the Death Star of American education. Race to the Top was the Executioner, scouring the land with a giant scythe in search of teachers, principals, and schools to kill if student scores didn’t go up.

Tragically, the Bush-Obama years produced a narrow focus on students’ and schools’ weaknesses, where holistic instruction was often replaced by nonstop remediation. They created a climate where many or most educators were prohibited from acting on the principles articulated by Ravitch:

I prefer to bet on the creative, can-do spirit of the American people, on its character, persistence, ambition, hard work, and big dreams, none of which are ever measured, or can be measured by standardized tests…

Subsequent posts will deal with the RttT, and the Executioner’s giant scythe.