Excerpts from “The Future of Education,” featuring Diane Ravitch, presented by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, Madison, March 8, 2011
Learn more about Diane Ravitch, including viewing videos of her speeches, at dianeravitch.com
– If we expect to see our schools make great strides, it seems to me that we need a well-educated, stable profession of educators. We need teachers with a solid background in their subject or subjects, preferably with a graduate degree in their subject, who know how to manage a classroom and deal with the problems that will arise daily. We need teachers who not only know their subject, but know how to make it interesting of students of 10, or 12, or 16. We need a stable and experienced teaching staff, not schools whose staff comes and goes with frequency.
– Public schools are public amenities, they’re public facilities, they’re public services, they’re public goods. You’re supposed to have one in every neighborhood. You don’t just close it because the [No Child Left Behind] scores are low, you do something about it. You help it. You improve it. You fix it. So imagine if Congress, in its wisdom, decides to pass a law based on… Let’s say they were very alarmed about crime statistics. So they pass a law saying that by the year 2014, every city in America will be crime-free. And any city that continues to have crime, we will close the police department down. And we will punish the cops by taking their badges away, and we will improve the quality of police officers by giving badges to anyone who wants them.
– A parent from Seattle got up, and she said, “I don’t want my child to have an ‘effective’ teacher.” The word “effective” today means higher test scores. “I want my daughter to have a teacher who is inspiring, caring, brilliant and wise.” No, you can’t measure those things, so you may be stuck with an “effective” teacher.
– Picking the right bubble from four possible choices does not reward divergent thinking, it rewards convergent thinking. It punishes the innovative student. It punishes creativity. It’s not good for our nation. Across this country, districts have expanded the time devoted to testing and preparing to take tests, and other subjects have lost time. Over the past several years, districts have been cutting back on the arts, cutting back on science, cutting back on history, geography, civics, even physical education. Even on recess. This is not good education. When the curriculum is narrowed to basic skills, it’s very bad education.
– We should not reduce the work of education to quantification. Our work is the work of replenishing our society and our social capital with men and women who have the hearts, the minds, the character, the ethics, the judgment, the knowledge, the wisdom and the ideals that we believe in. Men and women who are prepared to improve our society long beyond our years. This is our job, this is our work, and this is our mission. And this must be the legacy that we leave for the future. This is why we educate