Journalist Valerie Strauss interviewed historian Jack Schneider. Is Betsy DeVos right to say that American public schools have not changed for a century, she asks. He answers: Not true. Betsy DeVos doesn’t know what she is talking about.
Schneider says:
If we could transport ourselves to a typical school of the early 20th century, the basic structural elements — desks, chalkboards, textbooks, etc. — would be recognizable. And we might see some similar kinds of power dynamics between adults and children. But almost everything else would be different. The subjects that students studied, the way the day was organized, the size of classes, the kinds of supports young people received — these essential aspects of education were all different. Teachers were largely untrained. Access to education was entirely shaped by demographic factors like race and income; special education didn’t exist. Latin was still king. It was just a completely different world. To say that schools haven’t changed is just an extraordinarily uninformed position.
DeVos says these ridiculous things because she wants to disrupt public schools. The reality is that they are constantly evolving.
Teachers and principals are too busy working every day to “reinvent” their schools.
Strauss quotes Professor Adam Laats of Binghamton University (SUNY) who wrote that DeVos’ idea of education anywhere everywhere is actually an early 19th century idea. It didn’t work, it left many children behind, and forward-thinking educators realized the need for free, universal public education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Schools have changed drastically –for the worse. Once upon a time kids actually learned things in the elementary schools. Now they just DO things –with little real learning. Hours and hours of literacy test prep that allegedly strengthens their mental skills, but which actually does nothing. This is radical change to the basic content of schooling is just the latest scandalous innovation –there have been many others (the “open classroom”, “New Math”, “the social adjustment movement”) over the past century –many emanating from foolishness factories like Teachers College in NYC. DeVos does not know what she’s talking about, but she’s not alone: everyone repeats this brainless cliche about schools never changing. Has anyone read Diane’s Left Back? I was just talking to a recent college grad who’s considering becoming a teacher: he parroted the same dumb line as if he were uttering profound wisdom.
Schools have changed in many ways but they still remain an elitist caste system designed to serve the few. What hasn’t changed is a devastating system of failure that destroys children, letter grades that lie to parents, an accountability system on a dramatically un even playing field, teach to the test that destroys the students ability to think beyond the confirmation bias, carnegie units that pass kids on without learning or fails them into oblivion, and treats kids like objects.
De Vos talks in generalities as she knows not what she says. However, intelligent educators shoul understand the necessity of change.
Our public schools are stuck in “a 19th-century assembly line approach”? DeVos needs to spend time observing public school classrooms, at least in schools that will have her, as well as opening up a few books about the history of our country and of public education in particular. (To do this would require some intellectual curiosity on her part though.)
I don’t need to tell Diane Ravitch’s audience how profoundly our public schools have changed in the last century, for better or worse. We have Brown v. Board of Education, which ordered the desegregation of public schools “with all deliberate speed.” Of course de facto segregation persists, exacerbated by the charter school movement, but the case was still a victory. And on the downside, there’s the rise of standardized testing, along with the relentless drive to generate data about students and teachers and to use that data for questionable purposes.
In my own rather long career in public education I have observed many changes in evolving education. I also taught in a public system that embraced reasoned change and supported such changes with teacher training. We also had an evolving curriculum cycle that was designed to respond to changes in curriculum and instruction.
My area of specialization, ESL and bilingual education, did not exist a hundred years ago. The field developed after World War II at US Language Service Schools under the direction of the military, although settlement houses and churches had operated local volunteer programs prior to this. After the Civil Rights laws were passed, some universities started offering degrees in ESL and a few years later bilingual education. I finished by master’s degree in ESL in 1970. When I first started, I was among the first people in my county that held this degree. I had lots of autonomy to create a program, and I also helped other school districts in the county set up their own programs. I was part of two teams that helped write New York’s ESL curricula projects in the early ’80s.
Education evolves as it responds to the various needs of the community it serves. Unfortunately, within the last twenty years, it has been forced to respond to a variety of mandates from both the federal government and states. Many of these mandates are doing more to harm rather than help struggling students.
So far as statistics of working professional adults matter, the school system was not only working but increasingly getting better until it was very manipulatively attacked for holding an “untenable status quo” — an “untenable status quo” which presumably in secret meant “too many people of non-traditional backgrounds are moving into the professional/political sphere.”
Interactive white boards have been replacing chalk boards for almost two decades. Chalk is not lung friendly. The whiteboards can be marked up, but also display images from the internet, Powerpoints and so on. Desks in many schools have been replaced by tables that can be rearanged and accomodate wheelchairs. The stereotypes involked by DeVos are in perfect alignment with other arrogant amateurs who pretend to know about education.
If DeVos paid any attention whatsoever, she’d notice that in both schoolroom and workplace, early-20thC Taylorism has crept in via computer measurement and data collection. I suspect her routine slam on public schools is merely a knee-jerk soundbite. If she actually cared to prevent 100-y.o. ‘industrial science’ from ruling education, she would already have done something about this.