PEORIA -- Just as Peoria School District 150 is privatizing its new charter school, the scholar who once promoted charter schools has changed her mind, and now says they don't improve education and are destroying the public school concept.
She is Diane Ravitch. Read what she said in an interview with the New York Times.
"Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools
and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically
critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering
that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were
undermining public education."
"In 2005, she said, a study she undertook of Pakistan’s weak and
inequitable education system, dominated by private and religious
institutions, convinced her that protecting the United States’ public
schools was important to democracy."
"Charter schools, she concluded, were proving to be no better on average than regular schools, but in many cities were bleeding resources from the public system."She also attacks No Child Left Behind, the law that ties federal funding to schools to improved test scores.
In an interview with NPR she states: "There should not be an education marketplace, there should not be competition."
"Schools operate fundamentally — or should
operate — like families. The fundamental principle by which education
proceeds is collaboration. Teachers are supposed to share what works;
schools are supposed to get together and talk about what's [been
successful] for them. They're not supposed to hide their trade secrets
and have a survival of the fittest competition with the school down the
block."
Ravitch has nailed it. The latest fad, that schools can be run like businesses, won't work and could destroy our democracy. Will somebody please tell District 150?
-- Elaine Hopkins
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