Diane Ravitch, in a letter published on the Washington Post “The Answer Sheet” blog, attempts to defend herself from EdWeek reporter Stephen Sawchuk’s aside in a blog post that others thought she was “selective” in her evidence. (h/t EIA)
A keynote speech at a major NEA conference is a persuasive vehicle and meant to fire up a crowd. But, Ravitch is no longer operating as an academic researcher. She’s firmly in the advocate’s role–quick to try to smack down any questioning voice. And her letter in the Post offers confirmation.
In her opportunity to defend herself from being selective with evidence, she’s well, not only selective, but absolutely refuses to acknowledge any contrary evidence or hint that there may actually be some really gray areas that research is still trying to figure out. On charters, she writes:
I responded to the post by wondering what was “selective” about the Stanford [University] CREDO study of charter schools—which found that only 17% of them outperformed a matched regular public school—or scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which since 2003 have never shown an advantage for charter schools as compared to regular public schools.
Well, for starters, there’s CREDO’s other study that finds “Overall the results found that the typical student in a New York City charter school learns more than their virtual counterparts in their feeder pool in reading and mathematics.” And, you only have to read to the second paragraph of the press release on the main CREDO study that Ravitch cites to see that “The report found that the academic success of students in charter schools was affected by the individual state policy environment.” Performance across states was highly variable. There’s also the Hoxby study that shows strong performance for NYC charters.
I could cite more. Or I could also cite critics of the reports above. What we have is a real mixed bag. The interesting questions are around what makes charters succeed or not succeed, what policy environments and school variables contribute to success, and what lessons do we take away for all public schools (especially those serving disadvantaged students)?
My colleague Kevin Carey summed it up best:
It is, of course, certainly possible to be wrong about everything. And if you come to that realization, the honorable thing to do is admit it. But that should be a chastening experience, something that would make you wary of deciding you were suddenly right about a whole bunch of new things. That’s my criticism of Ravitch. She says she “lost the faith,” but I think it would be more accurate to say that she’s gone through a late-career faith conversion.
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Ravitch is so self-deluded in defending the teachers at Central Falls school — all of whom were rehired after they stopped being selfish bastards who had refused to do extra work to help the students even after being offered a $3,400 raise.
Ravitch is just a liar. She knows full well that there are more studies than the two that she loves to cite. She conspicuously failed, for example, to cite the RAND study showing that charter schools improve graduation rates dramatically. This would be wonderful news to anyone who pretends (as Ravitch does) to care about something beyond test scores. Nor did she cite the dozen or so studies showing that vouchers improve academic performance for African American students and/or public schools.
And citing NAEP trends as she does is just stupid — the reason social science exists in the first place is because you can’t tell anything just by eyeballing trends like that (without controlling for anything else).
Bill,
I didn’t disagree with anything you said until the end. I don’t know that Ravitch would disagree either, because you two are saying very similar things. She also was looking for the interesting things that we could learn about charters, and their ambiguous lessons are a part of the recent way of “reform” that hasn’t found much that is scalable. You two might disagree on details, and maybe you haven’t lost faith in the Market, but I see a lot more in common between you and Ravitch as opposed to the true believers in charters.
Where I get off is your praise of a passage that I find incomprehensible:
“She says she “lost the faith,” but I think it would be more accurate to say that she’s gone through a late-career faith conversion.”
What is the point of that sentence?
This is what happens when political and policy differences are turned into litmus test over where you break the big or the small end of the egg. “Reformers” should stop personifying differences of opinion turning them into morality plays, and make practical compromises. When people are constantly portraying their opinions as righteous crusades against the “status quo” and their opponents as self-serving special interests, it is harder to make incremental progress.
And maybe that’s why Ravitch upsets some “reformers” by her acknowledging that sometimes incremental progress is the best you can hope for, and sometimes incremental progress can do a lot of good over a reasonable amount of time.
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