Diane Ravitch’s Slaying Goliath left me with mixed emotions. During some chapters, I found her disingenuous - spewing generic, partial truths to mislead uninformed readers. In other sections of the book, I wanted to give her a bear hug and thank her for standing up for the vulnerable.
I was disgusted with her sweeping generalizations of philanthropists, charter schools, unions, and public-school teachers. Throughout the book, she wrote in absolutes, caricaturizing Disrupters and Resisters as wholly bad and good, respectively. I feel that framing opinions in such polarizing terms more resembles professional wrestling theater than robust debate. Still, a huge part of me wants her to be entirely correct. The soul of our country and civilization is in a precarious balance and, without excellent public schools, I think both will meet an undesirable end.
When I read The Death and Life of the Great American School System ten years ago, I vehemently disagreed with most of Ravitch’s viewpoints. At the time, I was a charter school teacher who had previously worked in a large urban school district. I had been (and remain) appalled by the power and abuses of its teachers union. But - my political and educational views have evolved over the past decade and while I remain conflicted over the issues Ravitch tackles, I will never feel good about America’s educational system until it ensures every child a safe, quality education.
This summer, I’ll begin my 20th year working in education, a career that has been divided evenly between classroom teaching and math coaching. During my ten-years in the classroom, I taught in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Southern Sudan, and Monterrey, CA. Three were spent in union public schools, one in a refugee girls school, five in a charter school, and one in an elite private institution.
The other half of my career has focused on work that Ravitch disdains. I’ve helped write a Common Core-aligned math curriculum, and frequently work as an outside consultant that supports program implementation and teacher training.
It’s possible that my inner struggle stems from my current work. Regardless of the profession, it’s challenging for a person to admit/accept that their livelihood perpetuates social injustice. There are certainly times when I haven’t felt great about my work or accepting public funds for it, but I also don’t consider myself a thief or carpet bagger. A better explanation might be that I’m simply a product of my era. I was in first grade when the A Nation at Risk report was published and always took for granted that America’s educational system is subpar.
Ravitch’s public school vision worked well for the community where I grew up. Many of my teachers were uninspiring, but all put forth reasonable to exemplary efforts. My high school routinely churned out Ivy-League caliber students (I wasn’t one of them!), even though less than 25% of the student body had college-educated parents.
Still, my teaching and consulting experiences have made me conclude that although my elementary, middle, and high school experiences worked out well for me, millions of students aren’t granted the same quality of structure and teaching that I received. Like Ravitch, I believe that poverty, not teachers, is the main cause of failing schools. Like Ravitch, I detest for-profit charters that bankrupt neighborhood schools. However, unlike Ravitch, I believe that, at least for now, our country desperately needs charter schools.
I’ve seen many students flourish in charters after struggling behaviorally and academically in their neighborhood schools. Without charter schools, many past, present, and future college graduates would fall short of their academic potential and remain in poverty (see The Euphoria and Tragedy of a Soon-to-be College Graduate).
There are also far too many great minds that have and will continue leaving the teaching profession if they can’t see a connection between their efforts, student achievement, and children’s emotional growth. Doing so is possible in traditional public schools, but big district bureaucracies often sap the vitality of young ambitious teachers who are willing to learn from veteran colleagues, but can’t see clear avenues to impact students as much as they hope to.
I enjoyed reading Slaying Goliath, but it left me with many unresolved feelings and questions, which I address below. I’ve italicized passages from the book and followed them with questions or comments.
Page 8: In some cities such as New Orleans, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., the very existence of public education has been put at risk by the growth of charter schools…The privatizers gloss over two fundamental facts: first, every dollar that goes to a charter school is taken away from public schools; second, public schools have fixed costs that cannot be reduced, requiring them to lay off teachers, increase class sizes, and cut programs.
Question: Is this the fault of charter schools or legislation? It seems that the bigger problem is education funding.
Page 11: The public schools belong to the public, and they should be properly supported by the public because they are our investment in the future of our democracy. They must provide an appropriate, well-resourced education for all children who enroll. All children have the right to be educated at public expense in public schools.
Question: Agreed! Does this make charters & traditional public schools mutually exclusive?
Page 29: The Disrupters oppose teacher tenure and seniority, which they consider barriers to removing ineffective teachers.
Questions: Do you see any downside to teacher tenure and seniority? Is something gained by having young teachers work long hours for no extra pay? Are children shortchanged when their schools don’t have a dynamic balance of youth and experience?
Page 52: The Resistance agrees on several central ideas…it opposes the misuse and overuse of standardized testing…it respects the teaching profession and believes that teachers and other school staff should have appropriate professional compensation…it wants public schools to have the resources needed for the children they enroll…it wants schools to cultivate the joy of learning and teaching…it places the needs of children and the value of knowledge above the whims and theories of politicians and philanthropists…it understands that students’ lives are influenced by conditions outside the control of the school, including their access to good housing, medical care, nutrition, and safe neighborhoods.
Comment: These ideas are not unique to the Resistance. Very few people working in education wouldn’t agree with each of these points.
Page 53: Even when they (charter schools) admit students by lottery, they can discourage unwanted students (those with disabilities or low test scores) from enrolling by telling them that the school is not “the right fit” for them; they can shed students by repeatedly suspending them for behavior issues, calling their mothers to conferences day after day, and using other tactics to push them out.
Comment: This passage is misleading. Although some charter schools are guilty of this, it’s unfair to imply that none of them work hard to serve English Language Learners, students with learning disabilities, or children with behavioral problems. Many charters are designed specifically to address these needs and many of their principals won’t push out disruptive children, because they fear for the child’s physical and academic well-being should they return to their neighborhood schools.
I worked for a charter school that was opened by a collection of reluctant community activists. For over 15 years, they lobbied neighborhood schools to provide ESL support for immigrant students. When their efforts proved futile, they felt they had no choice but to create a school that would serve their community’s needs.
There is nothing preventing large school districts from repeatedly suspending students for behavior issues or calling their mothers to conferences day after day. Students can be, and are, expelled regularly. The problem is that after the district reassigns a student, the child will likely be replaced by an expelled student from a different school. This carousel of schools trading their most disruptive students ensures that the institutions’ climates never change. Districts don’t need to continue this cycle. They could demand more accountability from parents and they could create schools that are designed to rehabilitate students with emotional and behavioral problems. It is politically challenging, but possible, to do both.
Page 54: The Resistance believes that educators should be professionals, that children should be treated as individuals, not data points, and that real education cannot be measured by standardized tests.
Question: Are you implying that Disrupters don’t believe this?
Page 55: In the 1960s, Jonathan Kozol wrote powerful books about the poverty, neglect, and segregation that harmed children in America’s urban schools…
Question: I’m turned off by a lot of Disrupter mantra, but wouldn’t Kozol’s early books amplify their point, i.e. public schools were/are failing our children?
Page 56: Finnish scholar Pasi Sahlberg…challenged the Disrupters’ narrative by presenting the counterexample of Finland, a nation that achieved international acclaim by respecting teachers as professionals, encouraging student creativity, and minimizing standardized testing.
Questions: Finland’s educational system has received great acclaim in recent years. I’ve never been to Finland, but (sincere question) does it make sense to measure the U.S. system against theirs? Within the U.S., practices that work well in one school don’t necessarily translate to schools just several miles away.
Page 135: The biggest innovation in the charter sector was the invention of “no-excuses” schools, which resurrected early-twentieth-century behaviorist models and strict discipline. Black and brown children, said charter advocates, needed “boot-camp” discipline, sternly administered, to learn the values of the white middle class to prepare them to join it.
Comment: I feel that “boot-camp discipline” is an unfair label and bringing ethnicity into its critique is unfair. I think it stands to reason that some children (regardless of their ethnicity) can benefit from highly structured environments.
Page 153: Pennsylvania has more than a dozen online charter schools, none of which has ever met state academic standards. These schools receive full tuition for every student who enrolls, so they compete to draw students away from public schools, even from other charter schools. But unlike brick-and-mortar schools, the online schools do not need custodians, groundskeepers, lunchroom staff, librarians, social workers, and security guards; nor do they pay for water and heat and electricity. Because of their low costs, the virtual charter schools are immensely profitable.
Comment: I think it’s atrocious that cyber schools get the same funding as non-cyber charter schools. Legislation should not allow it. However, I do think that cyber schools have a worthy niche in American education. If my neighborhood school was not educating my child and/or my child felt unsafe in the school, I would enroll them in a cyber school if I weren’t able to relocate to a better district.
Page 161: Charter advocates boast about long waiting lists, but such claims are a marketing ploy. Charters in Los Angeles and New York City have empty seats. If long waiting lists actually existed, the charters would not seek access to the names and addresses of public-school students for recruitment purposes.
Comment: I think this passage is misleading. Long waiting lines DO exist at many charter schools and not all of them recruit students. The best have reputations that do the recruiting for them.
Page 241: The Disrupters’ narrative…went like this: American education is failing. It must be rebuilt from scratch. The blame for this abject failure lies with bad teachers. Blame teachers’ unions, which protect bad teachers. Blame tenure and seniority, which give teachers a lifetime job without accountability. Blame locally elected school boards, which lack the courage to fire bad teachers. That is the critics’ narrative, and it is false.
Comment and Question: It is of course unfair to blame bad teachers and teacher unions for poor education. But – wouldn’t it be more balanced to acknowledge some of the aforementioned pitfalls and provide ideas/solutions to address them rather than denying their existence?
Page 277: The bible is a repository of ancient wisdom, and it remains an important source of inspiration and guidance to millions in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but using it to teach science is not education for the twenty-first century.
Comment: This is my favorite passage from the book.
Page 279: If charter parents are unhappy with a school decision, they are unlikely ever to meet a board member. If they bring a complaint to the charter principal, he or she is likely to tell them to find another school.
Comment: I agree with the first sentence but strongly disagree with the second. This is unfair to the many compassionate charter school principals who are actively working for social justice.
Additional Questions:
Throughout the book, you mention the pitfalls of too much standardized testing. I agree that American children are over-tested. Do you have a vision for alternative ways that testing should be handled?
Several times, you wrote unfavorably about the Common Core standards. Is there any upshot to national standards? Might it benefit students who move across state lines? Could it better streamline college admittance? Although it hasn’t done so, shouldn’t it lead to less testing?
Is the Libertarian, fossil-fuel funded agenda a reason to abolish charter schools, or is it merely an unfortunate, painful consequence of legislation that also allows well-intentioned people to create great charter missions?
Do you view lazy, incompetent teachers (they exist in traditional public, charter, & private schools!!) as a problem in American education? If so – do you have a solution?
Teach For America:
The negatives are obvious, but is the program itself a bad idea?
It’s not TFA’s fault that laws allow their candidates to teach so quickly.
TFA candidates leaving the profession after two or three years is unfortunate, but there might be a silver lining. I imagine that most TFA teachers leave with a greater understanding of urban plight and a sympathy towards educational challenges. In the long run, wouldn’t the spreading of this knowledge be beneficial? I view TFA a little like the Peace Corps. The latter is far from a perfect organization, but it has done much good in raising awareness to different global issues.
Many TFA candidates have energy and interest in children that veteran teachers do not. What they lack in experience they make up for in vitality. While this may not be an equal tradeoff, it’s not a total loss either.