Fred Klonsky has an excellent summary and hilarious critique of Mike Petrilli’s review of “Reign of Error.”
Mike suggests that I was “a double agent,” hiding in plain sight in rightwing think tanks for thirty years, so I could one day exposé them.
This is funny.
Checker Finn and I founded the Educational Excellence Network in 1981. We published screeds about declining standards for years. Note: That is when my work as a double agent began. When Checker joined the Reagan administration, I took over his role as leader of the Network. Aha, I had to double down on our criticism of the schools to hide my secret identity.
Checker recommended me to Lamar Alexander, who invited me to take Checker’s old job as Assistant Secretary in charge of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement and Counselor to the Secretary. Wow, I was really embedded in the belly of the beast.
After leaving government, I spent nearly two years at Brookings (warning sign of double agent!), turned down the offer to hold the Brown Chair in education (now held by Grover “Russ” Whitehurst, head of education for George W. Bush, who fired me from my unpaid fellowship at Brookings in 2012), and returned to Brooklyn in 1994 and a research professorship at New York University. For a time, it appeared that my days as a double agent were over.
But opportunity soon knocked, and I was paid to be a fellow at the rightwing Manhattan Institute, on whose behalf I went to Albany to testify on behalf of charter schools. The legislation passed, demonstrating that my bona fides as a double agent were in good standing.
Also, after I left government service, all the while pretending to believe in testing, accountability, competition, and choice, I wrote several articles advocating these policies to maintain the pretense. More important, I was a founding member of Checker Finn’s Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (now called Institute, for tax purposes).
I was also a founding member of the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution, which consisted of the creme de la creme of the conservative intelligentsia. Now firmly established as a genuine rightwing critic of our failing public schools, I learned all the inside secrets. Nirvana for a double agent! I learned that most of my colleagues hated unions (I already knew that); I learned that testing was the sine qua non of education policy (I knew that too); I learned that the answer to educational malaise was unregulated choice. (No surprise.) I loved the lavish parties, the great wines, I actually liked and enjoyed my colleagues.
But, finally, after thirty years as a double agent, the burden of duplicity became too great.
I had to confess that I preferred children to plutocrats.
I had to confess that I had no faith in the transformative power of unregulated choice (especially after the economic meltdown of 2008).
I realized I could not betray my origins as a graduate of the Houston public schools.
I lost my faith, if faith it was. I blew my cover with the publication of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System.” Author Steve Brill said I sold out for the speaking fees that unions would surely shower on me. How clever of me to plan so far in advance. After many years as a double agent, I laughed at Brill’s theory. I knew where the real money was–and when I blew my cover, so well hidden for thirty years, I knew I was leaving behind the Hoover Institution, the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Walton Foundation, and so many others willing to pay handsome fees to those they trust.
After my cover as a double agent was gone, I made a series of recommendations that Mike Petrilli ridiculed as pie in the sky:
Klonsky writes:
“Petrilli sneers:
“The skeptical, hard-nosed (if biased and data-slanting) Ravitch of the first half of her book turns into a pie-in-the-sky dreamer in the second half.
“Consider her “solutions”:
“1. Provide good prenatal care for every pregnant woman.
“2. Make high-quality early-childhood education available to all children.
“3. Make sure every school has a “full, balanced, and rich curriculum.”
“4. Reduce class sizes.
“5. Provide medical and social services to the poor.
“6. Devise actionable strategies and specific goals to reduce racial segregation and poverty.
“(She lists five other “solutions” that simply amount to rolling back reforms: Ban for-profit charters and charter chains; eliminate high-stakes standardized testing; don’t allow “non-educators” to be teachers, principals, or superintendents; don’t allow mayoral control of the schools; don’t view education as a “consumer good.”)”
Klonsky comments:
“That’s what Petrilli considers pie-in-the-sky.
“To me it sounds like a recipe for quality schools.”
I am only in the early pages of your recent book so you may address the issue, but what do you think of the claims in this article from today’s Freakonomics site: http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/25/does-early-education-reduce-the-achievement-gap/
My reply at freakonomics:
Any analysis that relies on standardized tests scores as “the metric” is invalid as all the errors involved in the making of educational “standards” and standardized testing render any results “vain and illusory” as Wilson states and has shown in “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
This is a funny post.
Why not return to Petrilli’s and Finn’s way to thinking? It’s richer pie at a higher elevation. 🙂
way OF thinking… 😉
Maybe Petrilli should look into The Rheeject being North Korean spy, planted to destroy American public education.
I was not aware that helping the poor and quality education for all were sneerable goals.
You’re obviously not part of the right social circles…
And ‘m sceeeerd
OMG. I could not stop laughing, reading this. Hilarious! What a delightful piece! 😛
Some people still believe in the “flat earth society”. Some people believe they alone possess “complete” truth so obviously every one else is ignorant.
Education is the search for “glimmers of truth”. Probably the best we can do is look to those experts who have spent their lives in scholarly in depth research. They may be wrong. Science itself keeps looking for “ultimate truth” but what is killing the U. S. is that those who know not that they know not but believe implicitly that they alone possess the “truth” and who have: “don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is already made up” mentality. That sad fact is, again, killing us, U. S.
Hi Diane. I was looking over one of the slides provided by the NYS Regents this week in their damage control operation regarding the disastrous rollout of the CCSS in NYS.I am attaching my take on their claim that there was “less” testing last year.Tell me what you think.Kathy WernerKingston, NY Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 16:00:36 +0000 To: lifeliner2@msn.com
From Petrilli: “. . . we education reformers have left ourselves exposed and vulnerable to her attacks by overselling, and underthinking, our own ideas.”
Boy is he correct about the overselling and underthinking parts.
I think the owner of this blog is doing a pretty good job of imitating those comedians that both make you laugh and make you think.
And the more you think about it, the more you laugh!
Just think of one small point: according to some of her critics, she must be in it for the benjamins. Rrrrrright….. Which makes perfect ₵ent₵ to those influenced by the Rheeality Distortion Fields of $tudent $ucce$$ — although to denizens of Planet Reality, it is clear she must be engaged in a self-defeating enterprise since she is backing further and further AWAY from the dispensers of largesse, not TOWARDS them.
Could it be that Diane Ravitch, noted historian of American education, has completely lost both her mind AND her sense of direction? [Er, ₵ent₵ of direction…]
😦
I think not.
A double dose of non-informational text is in order to celebrate this posting:
“The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.” [Mark Twain]
“No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.” [Voltaire]
Now combine the two: “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” [For the rheeally EduSatire challenged: sugar = laughter & medicine = thinking rationally and compassionately]
Dr. Ravitch, you’re on duty!
🙂
Some people just can’t grasp the concept of changing one’s theory in the hard light of data that defeats it. They would rather cook the data instead.
Diane is still too enthralled with Checker Finn for my tastes. She seems to think he has good intentions, I think he’s just another snake oil salesman
Here’s a parody of New York State Ed.
Commissioner’s pushing of excessive
high stakes testing and the dubious
and unproven Common Core
standards:
This video never gets old!