Anyone who's been paying attention knows that Diane Ravitch has taken an increasingly contrarian position on education reform, and sees a lot not to like in George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind and Barack Obama's Race to the Top. Arguing against her views is, of course, fair game, such as when Nelson Smith of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools pushed back against her assertions that charter schools are by and large no better than their traditional public school counterparts. Diane isn't a research methodologist, and her interpretations of the data might be, well, open to interpretation.
But she is a renowned education historian, and so attacking her on historical grounds brings greater risks, as Kevin Carey* of Education Sector just learned. In a post the other day, he criticized Ravitch's opposition to the Race to the Top application, and in particular her call for the federal government to respect??the states' "best ideas" rather than just imposing its own ideas on the states. (This is in line with what I've been writing, too.). Carey responded:
One would think that an education historian might at least acknowledge that throughout the 20th century the "best ideas" of many states when it came to K-12 education amounted to creating and preserving a system of vicious institutionalized racism, a system that only ended when the federal government decided to stop "respecting the rights of federalism" and began "overstepping the bounds of federal authority in education" and "dictating education policy to the states" via means a whole lot more coercive than dangling money in front of legislatures, i.e. force of arms.
Kevin, Kevin, you were really asking for it. Here comes Diane, roaring back:
Time for a history lesson, boys.The federal government did not intervene to eliminate state-sponsored racial segregation in the mid-1960s just because the Johnson administration thought it was a good idea. It acted forcefully for two reasons: first, because the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in 1954 that school segregation was unconstitutional and followed up with additional decisions; and second, because the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Thus, the Johnson administration had the legal authority to enforce decisions of the Supreme Court and the laws of the United States government.
To compare this series of events to the Obama administration's decision to use nearly $5 billion to bribe states to do what the administration wants to do is simply ahistorical and wrong.
The Obama administration wants states to change their laws limiting the number of privately-managed charter schools and to change their laws that prevent the evaluation of teachers based on student test scores. These policy preferences are not based on any court decisions nor any enactments by Congress. As it happens, they are not supported by social science evidence or experience. They are simply hunches and preferences, nothing more.
Anyone who believes that the U.S. Department of Education has the wisdom to run the nation's schools and dictate their every policy lacks understanding of and respect for the nature of our federal system of government, and is ignorant of history as well.
Smack!
* I should say that Kevin was an incredibly good sport at our event on vouchers and charter schools yesterday, fielding most of the toughest questions and responding with his trademark cool and thoughtfulness.
