Diane Ravitch engages in a spirited debate with Kevin Carey of Education Sector and DFER board member Andy Rotherham of Eduwonk – and they take her to pieces, primarily with the point that while she continues to be a good historian, her book offers NOTHING in terms of what should be done to fix the school system that EVERYONE agrees is broken.
I've always viewed this struggle as a journey of 1,000 miles – one that will last beyond my lifetime, if we define the end of the journey as high-quality schools for ALL children. The system is so big, so broken, and so lacking in market mechanisms that might force improvement (witness the automakers, for example) that this is going to take a LOOOOOOOOONG time…
That said, I'm not discouraged – I think we're making progress, and at an ever increasing rate in recent years – but I'm also realistic that 20 years after TFA was founded, 16 years after KIPP, 9 years after NCLB, etc., we're maybe 50 miles (only 5%) into the journey – and it's been a brutal, bloody journey to date, with reformers being attacked constantly from all sides every step of the way.
The difficulty of this journey and the modest progress so far makes it easy for sellouts and/or confused people like Ravitch to crap all over it. When you're only 5% of the way forward, it's easy to distort the data and make it look like there's been no progress at all. And it's equally easy to blame the people on the journey for the lack of progress and many setbacks along the way, rather than point the finger where it really belongs: on those doing the attacking, who over and over again throw children under the bus to advance their own (adult) interests.
Yes, what Ravitch is doing is easy – and deeply, profoundly wrong, both logically and morally…
She argues that because the reformers' ideas have not produced "the quantum improvement in American education that we all hope for," she argues that the solution is to abandon reform efforts entirely and retreat into platitudes and nice-sounding nostrums that will leave the abysmally failing status quo unchallenged and unchanged.