In today's thoughtful article on Diane Ravitch's "school reform u-turn," the New York Times' Sam Dillon writes about her longtime (and continuing) friendship with Checker Finn, and her service on the Fordham board of trustees.
One she heard criticize the No Child law was Chester E. Finn Jr., a former assistant secretary of education with whom she had written a book and worked at two conservative research groups, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.They were ideological soul mates and just plain chums. Often over the last decade, they were on the phone together or exchanging e-mail messages half a dozen times a day. But although Mr. Finn had become critical of the No Child law, he remained an advocate of charter schools and school choice.
By 2008, Mr. Finn said, ???there were more and more issues where the staff and everybody else on the Fordham board would say, ???Let's do A,' and Diane would say, ???Let's do B.'?????
Finally, she recalled, ???I told everybody at a dinner meeting at Koret that I was going to resign, and they all said, ???Come on, stay ??? we need somebody to argue with us.??? Dr. Ravitch stayed on for a time, but left both organizations last spring.
Mr. Finn has done his own rethinking, and he said he shared many of her disappointments.
???Standards, in many places, have proven nebulous and low,??? he writes in a coming essay. ????????Accountability' has turned to test-cramming and bean-counting, often limited to basic reading and math skills.???
But Mr. Finn has reached sharply different conclusions from Dr. Ravitch.
???Diane says, ???Let's return to the old public school system,'????? he said. ???I say let's blow it up.???
That "coming essay" Dillon mentions can be found today on Forbes.com, and in tomorrow's Education Gadfly.
-Mike Petrilli
