Diane Ravitch has been telling anyone who’ll listen that she was wrong, wrong, wrong. Ravitch calls herself an “education historian.” But for years she’s also been one of the nation’s most influential education policy advocates, championing “choice, competition, and accountability” as the means to better schooling. She now says she believes that the policies she long championed are counterproductive—the gung-ho standardized testing regimens, the charter schools, the No Child Left Behind reforms. Everything.
Like child-rearing, education predates civilization. And as with raising kids, you’d think a few hundred thousand years’ experience might inspire more confidence in our methods. But some 30 million Americans have “below basic” literacy skills and one-quarter fail to graduate from high school in four years. In his book How Lincoln Learned to Read, Daniel Wolff surveys the educations of an American pantheon that includes Lincoln, Sojourner Truth, and John F. Kennedy. Beyond an impressive dose of willfulness, however, common denominators are scarce. JFK was an indifferent student but a natural leader of boys long before he commanded men. Sojourner Truth learned on the sly, subverting society’s myriad efforts to keep slaves ignorant. And how did Lincoln learn to read? From his mother. Beyond that, his education consisted of a grab bag of books and the late nights spent perusing them. There was no educational foundation of “choice, competition, and accountability” under Lincoln’s stuttering ascent—just the shifting sands of genius. Good luck making a system out of that.
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