I’ve often founds mid-life reversals – whether personal or policy-based – rather interesting. Â So that’s why I found myself reading this piece on a lifelong standardized-testing/charter-schools advocate who has decided she was wrong:
Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schoolsand 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. [ . . . ]
“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.
Maybe so, maybe not. Â I really don’t follow it enough to know. Â But there’s a throwaway in the story that really grabbed me:
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.
Democracy is meaningless without an educated population. Â It is a basic – and essential – function of society to provide a decent public education to anyone who wants it. Â That isn’t to say that private or charter schools should be excluded – if someone wants to bear the cost of sending their child to one, they should be free to have at it. Â But not at the expense of a fundamentally sound public school system. Â And the undermining of that public school system too often seems to be the motivating force behind so many reform and charter school advocates. Â Using private and charter schools to indoctrinate, instead of educate, will only send us more quickly down the path of ruin.