Review: The Death and Life of the Great American School System

by Marvin King

Any serious student of K-12 education performance and reform efforts must read Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. Her basic premise is sound, and one that would definitely upset market-based reformers like Michelle Rhee, Eli Broad and Joel Klein.

Ravitch argues that the incessant push to judging school and teacher quality by how well their students perform on standardized tests is both misguided and dangerous.

It is misguided because standardized testing is the wrong metric. “Teaching to the test” is just that. The ability to recite and regurgitate material in a rote fashion is not synonymous with actual knowledge. It just means someone can memorize information. Furthermore, the push to measure teachers based on student scores means teachers minimize and deemphasize knowledge. America’s schools deemphasize intellectualism at the exact same time that America’s creative class is needed more than ever before to develop innovative ways to stay on top of an increasingly competitive global economy.

We are pushing our students in the wrong direction.

A laser-like focus on standardized tests is also dangerous because it has led to an unfortunate rise in the school choice movement. Economic principles, in theory, are correct when arguing that more competition leads to better quality. In theory. In reality, however, schools are not a market no matter what Eli Broad says. Even in the distressingly small number of examples where charter schools are found to produce a net positive impact on education, the real choice facing public schools is that they lose resources to pay for these experiments even though the data does not suggest investing in charter schools is actually a good investment.

Ravitch explores these and other issues in the school reform movement. What makes her most credible is not her views per se, it is how she came to them. Ravitch worked for a number of years with Republican and market-oriented school reform efforts. She wrote this book only after a career spent trying to make these reforms work and then realizing that these reform efforts, many of which were spurred on by No Child Left Behind, only leave public schools behind.

It is an honest and sobering examination of public schools. Any serious effort at improving America’s school systems needs to start with this text.

Marvin King received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of North Texas and is now an Associate Professor of Political Science with a joint appointment in the African American Studies Program at the University of Mississippi. He conducts research into how political institutions affect African American politics. Marvin is available for public speaking engagements and you can follow him on Twitter @kingpolitics 

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