Admirable

It's always admirable to change your mind when the evidence indicates that you were wrong. That's fundamental to the scientific method, and the whole point of evidence-based thinking in general. But with most people, it happens all too seldom. And I must say that I never expect it from right-wing ideologues (or from ideologues of any stripe, frankly).

But here's an article in the New York Times (registration required, though it's free) about Diane Ravitch, "the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators" who is "in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling."

Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups.

“School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ ” Dr. Ravitch said in an interview. 

In a new book, Ravitch says that the "new thinking" (i.e. from the far right) sees "the public school system as obsolete, because it is controlled by the government." That's the knee-jerk reaction of these extremists today. Government is bad. Period.

In 2005, she said, a study she undertook of Pakistan’s weak and inequitable education system, dominated by private and religious institutions, convinced her that protecting the United States’ public schools was important to democracy. 

You'd think that would be obvious, wouldn't you? Our strong public school system is what brought American education to lead the world. It provided an opportunity to every child, not just the rich. As such, we developed a society where class was fluid and relatively unimportant. (To our misfortune, that wasn't the case with race, of course.) But with the constant refrain of tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts, our education system these days does not lead the world, far from it.

She remembers another date, Nov. 30, 2006, when at a Washington conference she heard a dozen experts conclude that the No Child law was not raising student achievement.

These and other experiences left her increasingly disaffected from the choice and accountability movements. Charter schools, she concluded, were proving to be no better on average than regular schools, but in many cities were bleeding resources from the public system. Testing had become not just a way to measure student learning, but an end in itself.

“Accountability, as written into federal law, was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools,” she writes. “The effort to upend American public education and replace it with something that was market-based began to feel too radical for me.”

Personally, I'm a strong proponent of education, and public education in particular. (I might almost say that private schooling is fundamentally un-American, because it tends to segregate children by race, class, and especially religion. And don't get me started about home-schooling!) Nothing is more important in America than our public education system. Unfortunately, we've let way too many children down.

Well, I don't know all of the solutions to the crisis in education in our country. But I've got to respect anyone who can look at the evidence and change her mind like this. Very admirable!