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[Editor’s Note — This is the fifth and final installment in Stuart Buck’s critique of Diane Ravitch’s new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.”  Below is a list (with hyperlinks) of all five posts for our Ravitch is Wrong Week. 

The only conclusion I can draw after reading Stuart’s critiques is that Diane Ravitch’s new book is not a serious piece of scholarship.  I do not know (and I do not care) why a normally serious education historian would write such a book.  The only thing that matters here is that much of what she has to say is wrong.  Unless and until she or someone on her behalf addresses the issues that Stuart has raised, I think we can dismiss this unserious book and the people who peddle it.]

1. Ignoring or selectively citing scholarly literature;
2. Misinterpreting the scholarly literature that she does cite;
3. Caricaturing her opponents in terms of strawman arguments, rather than taking the best arguments head-on;
4. Tendering logical fallacies; and
5. Engaging in a double standard, such as holding a disfavored position to a high burden of proof while blithely accepting more problematic evidence that supports one’s own position (or not looking for evidence at all). ]

(Guest post by Stuart Buck)

DOUBLE STANDARDS:

The final problem endemic to Ravitch’s book is that she engages in a double standard — holding one side to a high burden of proof while putting forth positions or supposed facts that do not meet a high burden of proof (or that are completely unsubstantiated).

A typical pattern throughout Ravitch’s discussion of vouchers and charter schools is that she demands overwhelming proof of astonishing gains. For example, she sneers that vouchers did not produce “dramatic improvement for the neediest students or the public schools they left behind.” (p. 132).

But as for her own affirmative claims, Ravitch often proceeds with little or no empirical evidence, and many of her own policy prescriptions do not come with any proof of improvement, even of the undramatic sort.

For example, Ravitch claims that “most districts . . . relentlessly engage in test-prep activities.” (p. 159). Most? Relentlessly? Ravitch presents no evidence for these claims.

Ravitch claims that “regular public schools are at a huge disadvantage in competition with charter schools,” in part because “charters often get additional financial resources form their corporate sponsors.” (p. 136). Ravitch has no systematic evidence for any claim that charters are financially better off than public schools. Even in New York, which is home to many of the educational philanthropists that Ravitch seems to despise, charter spending in 2008-09 had a citywide average of $14,456 — including private giving. This compares to $16,678 for students in traditional public schools.

To be sure, these two figures aren’t directly comparable — the charter figure included all expenses for all students but without calculating the benefit of free space provided to certain charter schools, while the traditional public school figure came from a report that excluded large categories, such as special education or fringe benefits, but that did include the value of debt service to pay for facilities.

The point, in any event, is that Ravitch makes unsubstantiated and convenient claims about charter school financing without even attempting the difficult work of piecing through educational finance matters like these. Moreover, Ravitch’s claim is wrong as to the country as a whole. Charter schools nationwide receive an average of 61% of the funding given to traditional public schools, mostly because states usually refuse to let charter schools have funds for facilities.

Ravitch says on page 220, “If we are serious about narrowing and closing the achievement gap, then we will make sure that the schools attended by our neediest students have well-educated teachers, small classes, beautiful facilities, and a curriculum rich in the arts and sciences.” To be sure, having “well educated teachers” or “a curriculum rich in the arts and sciences” is common sense. But Ravitch has zero evidence that “beautiful facilities” would do anything about the achievement gap. Nor does she seem familiar with the Jepsen/Rivkin study finding that California’s initiative to lower class size ended up harming minority children (because their teachers find more job opportunities elsewhere and schools fill the gaps by hiring less qualified and more inexperienced teachers).

For another example, Ravitch says (p. 238) that “every state should establish inspection teams to evaluate the physical and educational condition of its schools.” Ravitch offers no evidence that such inspection teams make any difference whatsoever.

For another example, Ravitch says, “If we are willing to learn from top-performing nations, we should establish a substantive national curriculum that declares our intention to educate all children in the full range of liberal arts and sciences . . . .” (pp. 231-232). This sounds fine and well. But Ravitch has no evidence that pushing for a “national curriculum” would accomplish any of her putative goals, rather than being watered down and misdirected by all of the same interest groups that (a) distort the textbook adoption process (as Ravitch herself has documented) and (b) have prevented any such national curriculum from being established to date.

Another double standard lies in Ravitch’s treatment of the scholarly literature. For example, while Ravitch nitpicks to death any study with a pro-charter finding she dislikes (when she bothers to mention such studies at all), she credulously cites the Lubienskis’ study purporting to find that students in public schools do as well or better than those in private schools. (p. 140). She claims that this study “demonstrated the superiority of regular public schools.” It did no such thing: It was merely a cross-sectional snapshot of students in public and private schools, and the authors admitted that “we cannot and do not make causal claims from cross-sectional studies such as NAEP.”

Finally, Ravitch’s rosy depiction of public schools has no evidentiary support. E.g.: “The neighborhood school is the place where parents meet to share concerns about their children and the place where they learn the practice of democracy. . . . As we lose neighborhood public schools, we lose the one local institution where people congregate and mobilize to solve local problems . . . . For more than a century, they have been an essential element of our democratic institutions. We abandon them at our peril.” (pp. 220-21).

It’s hard to fathom how a historian could write such lofty rhetoric about the past century of public schools, while not even giving passing mention to the fact that during much of that century schools were officially segregated by race and steeped in anti-Catholic bigotry, and to this day are often unofficially segregated by class and race. (Ravitch seems to have forgotten all of the historical knowledge on display in this article.)

Of course, Ravitch’s words are literally correct: during the past century, public schools “have been an essential element” of society’s democratic attempt to solve the “local problem” of keeping out black people. If that’s not what Ravitch intends to endorse, then she shouldn’t write such unqualified paeans to schools of a century ago.

Moreover, what exactly does it mean to suggest that people “congregate and mobilize to solve local problems” at the school? That surely isn’t a routine function of the vast majority of public schools; when my kids were at the local public school, the only mobilization I saw was all the minivans accelerating after leaving the car line. In fact, the practice of grouping people into a single public school probably causes more “local problems” than it solves (consider the furious debates that arise over curricular issues alone — evolution, sex ed, phonics and math instruction, etc.).

[Editor’s Note — This is the fourth installment in Stuart Buck’s critique of Diane Ravitch’s new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.”  Earlier this week he documented how Ravitch ignored or selectively cited scholarly literature, misinterpreted the research she did cite, and turned her opponents arguments into strawmen.  Today he focuses on how Ravitch’s book contains a series of logical fallacies.  Below is a guide to what you can expect (with hyperlinks as they become available) for our entire Ravitch is Wrong Week.

1. Ignoring or selectively citing scholarly literature;
2. Misinterpreting the scholarly literature that she does cite;
3. Caricaturing her opponents in terms of strawman arguments, rather than taking the best arguments head-on;
4. Tendering logical fallacies; and
5. Engaging in a double standard, such as holding a disfavored position to a high burden of proof while blithely accepting more problematic evidence that supports one’s own position (or not looking for evidence at all). ]

(Guest post by Stuart Buck)

LOGICAL FALLACIES:

Non Sequitur.

Ravitch claims that her “support for NCLB remained strong until November 30, 2006 ,” which is when she attended an AEI conference at which various conservative scholars agreed that NCLB’s choice provisions were “not working.” (p. 100-01). This is because only a small percentage of parents asked to transfer to a different public school — although, as Ravitch herself concedes, this may have been because of the schools’ own failure to let parents know that transfer was an option, the lack of nearby public schools to which to transfer, and/or the pre-existence of generous public school choice programs.

In any event, if one thinks that school choice is generally a good thing — as Ravitch did at one time — it is completely incoherent and illogical to switch to the opposite position based on what Ravitch now claims was her rationale. Based on what Ravitch learned at the 2006 conference, she could logically have concluded that NCLB’s choice provisions were being thwarted by obstreperous school officials, or that NCLB’s choice provisions were not likely to work a revolution in public education. But she could not have logically concluded that choice was actually a bad idea that was undermining education. That belief about choice had to have arisen from other motivations, not the post hoc story that Ravitch puts forth.

The Law of Non-Contradiction

The most pervasive logical fallacy in Ravitch’s book is the self-contradiction. When it comes to curricular issues, Ravitch repeatedly throws out arguments that strongly imply, if not require, support for choice, vouchers, and charter schools — things that Ravitch otherwise tries to paint in a negative light.

For example, Ravitch praises Catholic schools for providing “a better civic education than public schools because of their old-fashioned commitment to American ideals.” As well, she laments the fact that “many Catholic schools have closed,” in part because of “competition from charter schools, which are not only free to families but also subsidized by public and foundation funds.” (p. 221).

So one would think that Ravitch would continue to support voucher programs wholeheartedly, as she so eloquently did in The New Republic once upon a time. Vouchers level the playing field by offering inner city kids the choice of Catholic or other private schools along with charter schools. But Ravitch doesn’t say anything about vouchers other than to credulously report a couple of studies that failed to find test score gains for voucher students while nitpicking over the recent DC voucher study that did find test score gains. Not only does this suspicion of vouchers contradict Ravitch’s claim to support Catholic schools, it more fundamentally contradicts Ravitch’s claim everywhere else that it’s not right to judge policies or schools based on test scores alone.

Another contradiction is in Ravitch’s claim that NCLB’s goal of 100% proficiency by 2014 is a “timetable for the demolition of public education in the United States ,” because “thousands of public schools [are] at risk of being privatized, turned into charters, or closed.” (p. 104). Notably, what little evidence she discusses directly disproves her dire predictions. On page 105, she notes that in a 2007-08 study, more than 3,500 schools were “in the planning or implementation stage of restructuring,” but that “very few schools chose to convert to a charter school or private management,” instead choosing the “ambiguous ‘any-other’ (i.e., ‘do something’) clause in the law.” In other words, thousands of schools are NOT at risk of being privatized or turned into charter schools; as Ravitch’s own meager evidence shows, those thousands of schools will almost all find a way around such a fate.

Another serious contradiction arises from Ravitch’s praise for the Core Knowledge curriculum. She notes that “students who have the benefit of this kind of sequential, knowledge-rich curriculum do very well on the standardized tests that they must take. They do well on tests because they have absorbed the background knowledge to comprehend what they read.” (p. 236). She similarly contends that “ironically, test prep is not always the best preparation for taking tests. Children expand their vocabulary and improve their reading skills when they learn history, science, and literature.” (p. 108).

But this point contradicts more than one of Ravitch’s other arguments. First, if students given a broad and rich curriculum in fact do better on reading and math tests, then it makes no sense to blame accountability (as Ravitch elsewhere does) for supposedly forcing schools to limit the curriculum to just reading and math. If Ravitch is right about Core Knowledge, she should spread the wonderful news that school leaders’ best bet is to adopt a broad and rich curriculum, rather than peddling the misinformation that testing inherently leads to a narrow test-prep curriculum.

Second, Ravitch ignores the fact that charter schools are nearly TWENTY times more like to adopt Core Knowledge as a curriculum than other public schools. (True, the percentage of charter schools that adopt Core Knowledge is still fairly small, but the percentage of public schools that adopt Core Knowledge is barely discernible at all.) Indeed, Ravitch herself previously documented in detail (“The Language Police”), so many entrenched interest groups play tug-of-war over the public schools that textbooks usually end up as the lowest common denominator. Given Ravitch’s previous work here, it’s quite odd for her, of all people, to fall back on the naïve hope that traditional public school systems will suddenly start adopting Core Knowledge or any similarly rigorous curriculum.

In any event, it is incoherent for Ravitch to disdain the one type of school that is most likely to adopt the curriculum she claims to favor. And again, it is an especially bizarre flight of illogic for Ravitch to disdain charter schools based on their test scores, which she elsewhere ridicules as an unfair way to judge the merit of a school.