By Michelle Rhee’s administration? In DC? Because if not, then what grounds does Ravitch have for smearing Rhee, by name, as a “colleague” of Sharpton?

I support the reforms in question, too. Am I also a “colleague” of Al Sharpton?

Perhaps Ravitch’s outrageous smears only count when they affect people who happen to live in New York City.

I have made a substantive critique of Ms. Ravitch’s post, not an ad hominem attack. I am to understand that an accusation by Ms. Ravitch that Klein, Fenty and Booker are out to “destroy public education piece by piece” without presenting a single bit of supportive evidence is not an ad hominem attack? Or that somehow it represents intellectual honesty?

A long and distinguished career does not entitle one to make such reckless and unsupported claims.

Like all of us, Dr. Ravitch has a right for her opinion to be respected and discussed without opponents resorting to such a childish (and inaccurate) attack. Apparently, Prof. Greene and his band of acolytes can’t muster the intellectual arguments to counter those of Dr. Ravitch, so must resort to this denigration of her scholarship and beliefs.

And while Dr. Ravitch has the intellectual honesty to evolve her positions based on the facts on the ground, her conclusions over her long and distinguished career have been remarkably consistent. This includes her criticism of the Bloomberg-Klein “reforms,” unrolling and unraveling here in New York. No one can recognize the folly of education failure in Gotham better than Dr. Ravitch, who wrote The Great School Wars, the definitive history of previous reform gone wrong.

Despite the best efforts of the army of flaks and spinmeisters paid for with public funds to “sell” the Bloomberg administration’s efforts, supplemented by a $20-million marketing campaign to promote the “reforms,” her criticism resonates with the public here. The newspapers are catching on to the wild grade inflation on New York State standardized tests, upon which Messrs. Klein and Bloomberg base their claims of success, and legislators are now wondering whether we can afford hugely expensive reforms that do not deliver the goods in a time of severe economic peril.

Mr. Ladner’s equating the huge cost of Bloomberg/Klein regime with the mere doubling of education expenditures nationally between 1971 and 2004 is wildly off the mark. Between 2002 and the present, just six years, expenditures for education have risen in New York City by 79%, about nine billion dollars. I can assure you that this is of no small concern to this New York City taxpayer. And that huge increase has not been accompanied by any increase in academic performance, let alone a commensurate one.

Finally, it should be recognized that the involvement of Rev. Sharpton as the spokesperson for the “reforms,” is not a result of coincidence, but design. He was solicited for this by the administration. I won’t go into the historical record of Rev. Sharpton’s negative, deceptive and perhaps even criminal role in New York City’s civic life. But if this charlatan is who Chancellor Klein and Mayor Bloomberg choose to symbolize their “great civil rights initiative,” no stronger indictment can be made of the entire enterprise. As a journalist here in New York for many years, guilt by association with Rev. Sharpton is the kindest thing I can say about those who choose to cast their lot with him.

If it was, as Mr. Greene suggests, the choice of Dr. Ravitch. Sol Stern, Rick Hess and Mike Petrilli to jump off the train as Rev. Sharpton and and that other educational role model, Marion Berry, have gotten on, I say, “good for them.” They have avoided the train wreck sure to come.

If parents cannot make informed choices of schools, how can they make informed choices of legislators who choose schools. Expertise is important, but it’s important that experts not choose the experts.

I recommend GT Kurian __Encyclopedia of Education__ (iirc) on international school organization. See also Postlethwaite (=??), and OECD __Education at a Glance__.

NB. The World Bank and OECD internet sources differ wildly from OECD’s __Education at a Glance__, Kurian, and Postlethwaite. I e-mailed the Hong Kong Minsistry of Education some years ago for information of the distribution of enrollment, by type, and a gentleman named Michael Lee gave me raw data which amounted to the 10% in government-operated schools versus 90% in aided (voucher-accepting) schools, so I trust the OECD dead tree version and not the World Bank and internet OECD versions (which supply exactly the same numbers, so that’s most likely ONE source, not two).

http://jaypgreene.com/2008/08/25/systemic-effects-of-vouchers/

One of the reasons that experimental voucher programs in places like Milwaukee have been less than stellar in results is because far two many parents make uniformed choices or choices for reasons unrelated to their child’s success. Many parents will choose the school that is closest – to home or their work – without bothering to check the details. Parents have an expectation that all schools should be equal, and that’s not an unreasonable claim. Therefore, the danger has always been that the motivated parents move their kids to better schools, and the rest are left to struggle even more. Thus, opponents of vouchers do have a valid – though not perfect claim – that society should work toward improving all schools equally, especially by bringing substandard ones up.

I’m intrigued by your claims about foreign schools, and I will follow up on them. There is much we can learn from other systems, rather than continuing with our current status quo. Again, the problem with parents who inadequately raise their children – and there are many – is they create far more serious social problems that we must then deal with. Dare I say that society/the economy has become far too complex to argue that democracy survived in the early days of post-revolutionary society.

I am impressed by your ideas, but I think I’m too pragmatic to say they don’t need extensive vetting.

Here’s my proposal, in full.

http://harriettubmanagenda.blogspot.com/2005/12/proposal.html

You conclude with a fascinating proposal. It seems incredibly impractical and a recipe for disaster in an industrial society, but it caught my attention.

There is a proposal out there called “Tough Choices, Tough Times” that discusses exams to be able to pass on to the next level. And I have been intrigued by the “un-schoolers” out there (world class skier and partier Bode Miller was a product of that). But a test to pass and then a check for $12000 – I wonder what I would have thought about that at fourteen.

The educated electorate upon which Jefferson said the republic depended would become rather precarious, but, like I said, I am certainly amused at your suggestion.

By the way, this came off sounding way more condescending than I meant, but I wanted to respond. Mea culpa

Michael

We measure system success by measuring student success (how else?). This introduces a fundamental difficulty immediately: what do we measure? I believe we commonly use reading vocabulary reading comprehension, and mathematical fluency because we have fairly unambiguous (and cheap) measures, not because we have consensus that these are more important than other skills. Further, given some accepted measure, how do we choose between two different distributions (e..g., higher mean with greater variance, or normal versus bi-modal)?

Success, as determined by the measures we use (grades, standardized test scores) requires , broadly speaking, three factors: a competent instructor, a coherent curriculum, and a motivated student. Motivation is where homeschoolers have a large advantage. Children, especially young children, will work their hearts out for the love of parents. Schools cannot replicate this, and the attempt would entali huge risks.
Motivation and parent involvement also relate to the advantage of market systems (e.g., tuition vouchers). Vouchers give to the people who know individual children best and who are most reliably concerned for their welfare (parents) the power to match individual children’s interests and abilities to a the learning environment and to the curriculum.

The argument that a difference in parents and not a difference in institutions accounts for tthe success of homeschoolers and independent schools fails, for it implies that these succesfully concerned parents are systematically deluded. They would be the same people if they sent their children to the local government school and then they would have one more income (homeschoolers) or the private school tuition (Catholic school) to spend on supplementary materials at home and their children would have done even better. Therefore a contradiction: these parents are NOT successfully concerned.

School is a means, not an end in itself. On the job training is also “education”. Compulsory attendance laws, child labor laws, and minimum wage laws put the o-j-t option out of bounds. Society loses as a result.

Cyrus McCormick was homeaschhoed. His father was a farmer and blacksmith. Richard Arkwright was homeschooled. James Hargreaves had only a few years of schooling. Thomas Highs never learned to read. These people kick-started the industrial revolution. I believe people develop “fluency” with machinery (or most other skills) through early exposure. The academic curriculum, compulsory attendance laws and child labor laws, form an insurmountable barrier between young children and fluency in many valuable skills.

David Farragut joined the Navy at 9, went to sea at 11, and commanded his first ship at 15. Robert FitzRoy was homeschooled to age 12, attended the Admiralty school from 12 to 14, then went to sea. Thomas Edison was homescholed and went to work at 13. Hiram Maxim left school at 13 and apprenticed.

I don’t believe everyone should go to college, anymore than everyone should sleep in a bed in a hospital ward every day for four years. Hospitals are for people who need medical care. Schools (K-PhD)–should– be for people who need help with learning. Want to learn Russian History or to 19th century American Literature” Read a book or twelve. You don’t need to kiss some professor’s
toes.

It does not take 12 years at $12,000 per student-year to teach a normal child to read and compute. Much vocational training occurs more effectively on the job. State provision of History and Civics instruction is a threat to democracy, just as State operation of newspapers would be (is, in totalitarian countries). In the US, the “public” school system has become an employment program for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, a source of padded contracts for politically-connected insiders, and a venue for State-worshipful indoctrination. If this is not so, why cannot any student take, at any age, an exit exam (the GED will do) and apply the taxpayers’ age 6-19 education subsidy to any VA-approved post-secondary institution or toward a wage subsidy at any qualified (say, has filed W-2 forms on at least three employees for at least the previous four years) private-sector employer?