I am thrilled when I see that readers are looking at earlier blog posts. I started the blog in late April and have posted about 275 blogs. The earliest ones are as timely as the latest ones, but they get buried by the weight of new blogs.
I heard from a reader just now who came across my blog about a fascinating article in the Teachers College Record comparing U.S. education policy today to Stalin’s education policies: top-down, rigid and unrealistic goals, punishments for those who couldn’t meet the goals, and phony statistics.
The reader commented:
I didn’t know about Stalin’s education policies before I read this but for several years now I’ve been talking about “the Stalinization of education” — making an analogy to the famous five year plans which were imposed from above, set unrealistic goals with penalties attached, and resulted — of course! — in massive falsification of results and cooking of data by people on the ground. My wife and I are educators who work with English language learners and we suspect the real purposes of such goals, now as then, are intimidation, fear, and control. … Before I started talking about “Stalinization,” I was merely calling the situation “Dilbertesque.”
So, please dear readers, go to the archives of this blog and check out earlier postings. I guarantee you will find stuff you like and stuff to make you think, maybe even stuff to disagree with. They are yours to use and distribute at will. No copyright. No advertising.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wow, someone else who understands that we have been under increasingly what I have called for years the “Sovietization” of public education. I modified that phrasing to “McDonaldization” so that Americans, who had a hard time understanding that concept as the Soviet Union is long gone, would be able to understand. Why is it that if this country became so great (and I reject that characterization) from the end of WW2 to the mid 70′ we didn’t have “standardized education” but an eclectic mix of whatever the local school boards determined-not that all were rosy and good. But if I were going to destroy a country and its potential I certainly would “standardize” everything, especially the public education system a la the USSR.
Americans understand the concept that one cannot get a gourmet meal at McD’s. And I use McD’s as the example, not to criticize them and the model-standardization-they work under as it works tremendously to make the owner of the McD’s a ton of money. It appears that the folks in the USA want a gourmet meal (by definition non standardized) at McD’s prices. And that just doesn’t work in the public education realm. We don’t want to pay for the messiness that is non-standardized “gourmet” education.
Wow, I have been thinking the same thing about what is happening to public education with analogies to communism and Soviet Union. I love the McDonald’s reference as well, it’s very true.
I feel like they are boiling it down to a “One size fits all” type of factory system for schools, where quality control for teachers and students is standardized tests and schools like that will need to be staffed by compliant, tow the party line workers.
The wealthy will send their children else where, but the masses, having no option, will be forced into the regimented, boring, “One size fits all” factory schools.
I’ve been using the RSS feed of comments to find discussions happening in older articles, which can be interesting reading.
I have a dedicated file in my mail program w/ all DianeRavitch blogs saved since the beginning. It’s all there. How long will educators put up w/ this Re-“Stalinization” of education, of teachers, school staff, even of parents. We now have extremism pushing the top down command model. National, state, and local edicts constraining all to who, what, how, and, lately, why we teach. Determining, often without due process or negotiation, how tax dollars are spent and to whom they are given. To corporate schools or public, this new reform usurpation will determine the shape of our public education criterion.
Prolific in number, indispensable in staying connected to what we deal with and where we are going as educators, parents, communities, Diane Ravitch’s dispatches, more often written as she travels tirelessly nationwide, provide all with requisite and compelling revelation, while offering a means for all to provide their own commentary in return.
“They are yours to use and distribute at will. No copyright. No advertising.”
You may want to consider licensing your work here under a creative commons license, otherwise arguably All Rights Reserved copyright applies automatically. There are several WordPress plug-ins that will add a license to every post. I use this one: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/creative-commons-suite/. You also might consider just adding a general license to your About page: http://creativecommons.org/choose/. I’m happy to help with the technical stuff, and I’m sure many others would.
Using a CC license will ensure that all readers (including those generations away) know exactly how you intend the work to be freely shared, and it would be a good model for others.
Great idea, Justin. I am taking steps to use the creative commons license. I want people to use my work freely but to attribute the source. I don’t accept advertising, I don’t plug commercial products, I don’t take payment for anything on the blog. This is, as I say in the identifier, a site to discuss better education for all.
Diane
Yes, it is good to have the archives.
Regarding the Stalinism analogy, I’d be cautious. The Soviet Union started by embracing the “activity school” and the “project method.” Only after receiving numerous complaints did Stalin decide to change course (in the early 1930s).
Yet the Stalinist system does resemble ours in some way–not in the curricula (we have no national curriculum) but in the materialist/utilitarian emphasis. In Stalin’s system and in ours, whatever doesn’t produce a material result is scorned. Everything must fulfill a concrete objective.
A common national curriculum would not be a bad thing IF it were flexible and teachers had the freedom to teach it as they saw best. (I define curriculum loosely as an outline of certain topics and works that will be taught.) If there were just a few texts that everyone read, then we could have many interesting conversations about those texts. This could stimulate independent thought instead of stifling it.
We do not have national curriculum. The standards emphasize skills, which in the end are more restrictive than subject matter.
The best of all worlds would be a combination of communality and individuality–some common subject matter and a variety of approaches to it. Getting that combination right is the challenge.
Stalin must have been more sensitive to public opinion than some of our education leaders! Imagine, changing course in response to what the public thought or wanted.
Well, not the public, but some of his advisers. He also didn’t want chaotic schools, and the schools at the time were chaotic. I wouldn’t call this sensitivity.
He restored the teaching of individual subjects but exerted tight control over actual content, ideology, and methods. The early elementary school years focused on Russian language and literature and mathematics, with weekly instruction in drawing, singing, and physical education as well. By grade 6, students were studying Russian language and literature, mathematics, history, geography, biology, physics, chemistry, foreign language, phys ed, drafting (technical drawing), and labor. The curriculum sounds quite broad on the surface, and in some ways it was. But Soviet ideology reduced and distorted many of the subjects.
Stalin banned whatever he perceived as a threat. Supposedly he was asked, “Why do you ban so much Dostoevsky?” He replied, “Of course, he is a psychological genius, and that’s why we ban him.” (This quote may be apocryphal.)
He also abolished entire fields, such as genetics, which was declared a “bourgeois pseudoscience” in 1948. Geneticists were executed or sent to labor camps. He enforced Lysenkoism, which was taught as “the only true theory” from 1948 until the 1960s.
Yes, it is interesting and important to draw comparisons. I’d just caution against stretching them too far. We are not seeing “Stalinization” by a long shot.
It may be a stretch to call present policies Stalinization, but they are surely top-down, bureaucratic, and (in my view as well as that of many other scholars) ineffective. Reform cannot be imposed by Washington. Privatization may be one way to achieve reform, but privatization promotes private interests, not public interests. The policymakers promoting the current reforms are insensitive to research or evidence, and indifferent about the harmful effects of their policies on children, schools, and communities. No, not Stalinization. We need a new word to describe this authoritarian, headstrong, and heedless insistence on policies that don’t work in any educationally meaningful sense and that hurt real people.
I appreciate the lack of advertising and other distractions–yes, you have a few social media add-ons, but they’re few and unobtrusive. The simplicity and tranquility of the layout allow me to focus on the words themselves.