A Voice for Teachers

Diane Ravitch is a prominent education scholar who made big waves when she reversed ground and came out against such controversial measures as charters and high-stakes testing and accountability. She spoke to a packed house of Bay Area teachers at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, on January 18, 2012.

"Maybe standardized tests are not good predictors of future economic success or decline. Perhaps our country has succeeded, not because of test scores, but because we encouraged something more important than test scores - the freedom to create, innovate, and imagine."

No one should doubt Diane. She is an historian of education, educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education, she was appointed to public office by both President of the United States George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Secretary of Education Richard Riley asked her to serve as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which supervises the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

At the outset, Ravitch was hopeful that Charter Schools might be something along the lines that Al Shanker [the late president of the American Federation of Teachers] described. Public teachers could create charters. They would take the hardest-to-educate kids. And then they would return to the public schools to say this is what we've learned, free of all regulations.

Ravitch reminds us that now Charters have turned into a competitive force. Most of the people behind the charter movement are coming from the voucher movement, and they see it as a way to drive public education into the ground. Ninety-five percent of charter schools in this country are non-union schools. They try to keep the workforce very young. They have competitive salaries but only at the lowest level.

Ravitch also rejects Race to the Top, which bribes states to expand the number of privately managed schools. She predicts that we’ll see more profit-seeking corporations coming in and creating charter chains, and they will be interested mainly in the money, not in the kids.

The most toxic thing in Race to the Top, explains Ravitch, is that teachers will be evaluated by their student test scores. There is no evidence that this will make for better schools. The evidence is that it will cause fanatical, obsessive teaching to the test, a test which Arne Duncan has publicly admitted is no good, yet teachers will be judged by them. Should we here in California worry? The legislature in Florida just passed a law saying 50 percent of teachers’ salaries will be based on test scores.

Ravitch goes on to explain that the single biggest indicator of low achievement is poverty.

But there is a calculated effort to keep teachers from being heard and to have all the decisions made by the Gates and Broad foundations; the editorial boards; the think tanks (funded by Gates and Broad) who say to blame poverty is an excuse.

Then how will we evaluate the teachers? Diane describes the answer in two words: human judgment. “That's what we do in most other professions. We trust that they have supervisors who know their work better than we do.” As Ravitch remarked to sympathetic listeners in her closing remarks Wednesday evening “…when did accountability replace humanity in public education?”