Diane Ravitch on Education

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 April 2010

⏱️ 60 minutes

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Summary

Diane Ravitch of NYU talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Ravitch argues that the two most popular education reform movements, accountability and choice, have had unintended consequences that have done great harm to the current generation of students. She argues that the accountability and testing provisions in legislation like No Child Left Behind and similar reforms have actually corrupted the testing process, taken time away from subjects other than math and reading, and failed even to boost success in math and reading. She argues that the empirical record has provided little evidence that school choice as it has been implemented has boosted achievement. The discussion closes with a discussion of what reforms might indeed make a difference.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you.
0:36.5	Today is April 7, 2010, and my guest is Diane Ravich, formerly the Assistant Secretary of Education,
0:46.1	currently a research professor at NYU, and the author most recently of the death and life of the
0:51.8	Great American School System, how testing and choice are undermining education, and that book is
0:57.6	our topic for today. Diane, welcome to Econ Talk. It's great to be with you, Russ. So your book opens
1:02.6	with a very broad brush and very illuminating account of some of the reform movements of the
1:07.2	last century or so. What were some of those ideas and what happened to them in the United States?
1:12.4	Well, I've been writing about education and history of education for about 40 years. I got my
1:18.5	doctorate Columbia 35 years ago, and what I've always noticed from the very beginning was the
1:27.1	American education always seems to be in crisis, and the crisis talk is used to drive some particular
1:33.8	change. In the beginning of the 20th century, it was progressive, who said we were in crisis,
1:37.9	because the schools were too traditional, and there needed to be more progressive, active hands-on
1:42.8	curriculum, and we've heard this time and again throughout the 20th century. There was also a
1:49.3	demand in the early 20th century for more vocational education, more industrial education, this led to the
1:54.0	passage of the first federal legislation about education, which was aid to vocational education, the Smith
2:00.9	Youth Act of 1917. During the 20th, the Great Crisis was the lack of seats, because we had had the huge
2:06.6	turn of immigration from all over Eastern Europe, and not enough seats to house the kids who were
2:15.2	coming into schools. So there was a big boom in school construction in the 20s, but in the 30s, the demand
	...

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