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Education: Achievement Gap Starts Before School Starts
Diane Ravitch
Diane Ravitch represents an unusual example of an education expert who
publically admitted a complete reversal of viewpoint. In the early 1990’s,
during the George H.W. Bush administration, she was the assistant of
education who actively supported school reform through testing, punitive
accountability, market principles, and charter schools. President Clinton
appointed her to the National Assessment Governing Board to oversee
federal testing. By 2007, however, she concluded that all of these ideas
for school reform had remained only theories that had not worked out in
practice or reality. This reversal led to her 2010 book The Death and Life of
the Great American School System How Testing and Choice are Undermining
Education. Dr. Ravitch is presently Research Professor of Education at New
York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
The following article was published in the San Antonio Express on
October 13, 2011.
If you read news magazines or watch TV, you might think that
American education is in a crisis of historic proportions. The media claim
that that our future is in peril because our students have low test scores
caused by incompetent, lazy teachers.
Don’t believe it. It’s not true.
Yes, our students’ scores on international tests are only average, but
our students have never been at the top on those tests; when the first
such test was given in 1964, we ranked 12th out of 12. And, yet, the
United States continued to prosper.
So 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.
Unfortunately, recent educational reforms throw aside that philosophy in
favor of an even greater emphasis on test scores.
In 2001 Congress passed No Child Left Behind, which imposed a
massive program of school reform based on standardized testing. The
theory behind the plan was that teachers and schools would try harder—
and see rapid test score gains—if their test results were made public.
Instead of sending the vast sums of money that schools needed to
make a dent in this goal, Congress simply sent testing mandates that
required every child in every school to reach proficiency by 2014—or the
schools would be subject to sanctions. If a school failed to make progress
over five years, it might be closed, privatized, handed over to the state
authorities, or turned into a charter school.
The Obama administration launched its own school reform plan in
2009 called Race to the Top. The program dangled nearly $5 billion in front
of cash-hungry states, which could become eligible only if they agreed to
open more privately managed charter schools, to evaluate their teachers by
student test scores, to offer bonuses to teachers if their students got higher
test scores, and to fire the staff and close schools that didn’t make progress.
None of these policies has any consistent body of evidence behind it.
The fundamental belief that carrots and sticks will improve education is a
leap of faith, an ideology to which its adherents cling despite evidence to
the contrary.
Two major reports released in spring 2011 showed what a risky and
foolish path the United States has embarked upon.
The National Research Council gathered some of the nation’s leading
education experts who concluded that incentives based on tests hadn’t
worked. In other words, the immense investment in testing over recent
decades was based on intuition, not on evidence—and faulty intuition, at that.
The second report, by the National Center on Education and the
Economy, maintained that the approach we are now following—testing
every child every year and grading teachers by their students’ scores—is
not found in any of the world’s top-performing nations.
Piece by piece, our entire public education system is being redesigned
in the service of increasing scores on standardized tests at the expense of
the creativity, innovation and imagination that helped this country succeed.
We are now at a fork in the road. If we continue on our present path
of privatization and unproven reforms, we will witness the explosive
growth of a for-profit education industry and of education entrepreneurs
receiving high salaries to manage nonprofit enterprises.
The free market loves competition, but competition produces winners
and losers, not equality of educational opportunity. We will turn teachers
into “at will” employees who can be fired at the whim of a principal based
on little more than test scores. Their pay and benefits will also depend on
the scores. Who will want to teach? Most new teachers already leave the
job within five years.
What the federal efforts of the past decade ignore is that the most
consistent predictor of test scores is family income. Children who are
homeless or living in squalid quarters are more likely to miss school and
less likely to have home support for their schoolwork. Children who grow
up in economically secure homes are more likely to arrive in school ready
to learn than those who lack the basic necessities of life.
If we are serious about closing the achievement gap, we should make
sure that every pregnant woman has good prenatal care and nutrition and
that every child has high-quality early education.
The achievement gap begins before the first day of school. If we mean
to provide equality of educational opportunity, we must level the playing field before the start of formal schooling. Otherwise, we’ll just be playing
an eternal game of catch-up—and that’s a game we cannot win.
Study/Writing/Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think it is rare for a public figure to profess to a complete
change of viewpoint?
2. Make an outline of the argument she presents in this essay. Begin by
stating the opening claim she is refuting. Then list the reasons she
gives to support her assertion that this claim is not true.
3. In conclusion, what does she say is the most significant predictor of
student test scores?
4. What recommendations does she make to remedy this problem?
5. Explain why you agree or disagree with her conclusion