Laura: Here’s a wild thought: what if the single biggest thing holding back American schools isn't lazy teachers or a lack of funding, but a series of well-intentioned, multi-billion-dollar ideas that spectacularly backfired? Sophia: That sounds like a conspiracy theory. You’re telling me the solutions are the problem? Laura: We’re talking about reforms that promised a revolution but, according to our author today, delivered chaos. It’s the explosive argument at the heart of The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch. Sophia: And what makes this book so powerful is who she is. This isn't some outsider throwing stones. Laura: Exactly. Ravitch was a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education, a one-time champion of the very policies she now dismantles: standardized testing, accountability, and school choice. This book is her public, evidence-based reversal—a stunning intellectual turn that shook the world of education policy. Sophia: Wow. So she was an architect of the system and then wrote the manual on how it's failing. That takes guts. Laura: It does. And she argues it all started with a seemingly simple, noble goal: creating national standards for what kids should learn. A good idea that, as we'll see, went horribly wrong.

Sophia: Okay, I have to stop you there. National standards for what kids should learn? That sounds completely logical. Why would anyone be against that? It seems like the bare minimum for a functioning education system. Laura: You would think so! And in the early 1990s, there was a huge, bipartisan push for it. The idea was to create voluntary national standards in core subjects like history, math, and science to ensure a rich, coherent curriculum for all students, no matter their zip code. Ravitch herself was a huge proponent. Sophia: Makes perfect sense. So what happened? Laura: Politics happened. Specifically, the National History Standards controversy of 1994. A team of historians, with federal funding, developed these incredibly detailed standards. But just before they were released, Lynne Cheney, the former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, wrote a blistering op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Sophia: Attacking them for what? Laura: For being too "politically correct." She claimed they focused too much on the nation's failings and gave short shrift to traditional heroes like George Washington. For example, the standards mentioned Harriet Tubman more times than Ulysses S. Grant. The debate exploded. It became a culture war proxy fight on talk radio and in the op-ed pages. Sophia: Oh, I can just picture it. A fight about what version of America gets taught in schools. Laura: Precisely. The controversy got so heated that the U.S. Senate passed a resolution condemning the standards by a vote of 99-to-1. Sophia: Ninety-nine to one? That’s not a vote, that’s a stampede. Laura: It was. And the fallout was immense. The word "curriculum" became politically radioactive. No politician wanted to touch the third rail of telling people what their kids should learn. This created a massive vacuum. The standards movement, as a push for rich content, was dead. And something else rushed in to fill the void. Sophia: Let me guess. Something easier to measure? Laura: Exactly. If you can't agree on what to teach, you can at least agree on measuring if something was learned. The focus shifted from the substance of education to a simple accounting strategy. This led directly to the No Child Left Behind Act, or NCLB. Sophia: Right, NCLB. I remember that. The law that was going to fix everything with accountability and testing. Laura: That was the promise. But Ravitch argues it was built on a flawed premise. NCLB mandated that every single student in America be "proficient" in reading and math by 2014—an impossible goal. And the only tool it provided was a hammer: high-stakes standardized tests. Schools that failed to make "Adequate Yearly Progress" faced escalating punishments, from being publicly shamed to being shut down. It was a philosophy of "measure and punish." Sophia: But don't we need tests to know if schools are working? How else do you hold them accountable? Laura: That's the key distinction Ravitch makes. There's a world of difference between diagnostic tests that help teachers understand a student's needs, and high-stakes tests used as a weapon. She tells this heartbreaking story from a book by Linda Perlstein, who spent a year in an elementary school in Annapolis. The teachers were good, dedicated people, but they were forced to spend the entire year obsessively preparing for the state test. Sophia: So, teaching to the test? Laura: It was worse than that. They were teaching test-taking tricks. The kids learned how to eliminate wrong answers and guess strategically. They got good at the test. But when asked basic questions about history, geography, or science, they knew almost nothing. They were being trained, not educated. Their scores went up, but their knowledge was hollow. Sophia: Wow. So the very tool meant to ensure learning was actively preventing it. Laura: That’s the tragic irony. The system incentivized the wrong things. It narrowed the curriculum to just reading and math, because that's all that was tested. Art, music, history, civics—they all got pushed aside. Ravitch argues NCLB didn't leave no child behind; it left the curriculum behind. Sophia: Okay, so if top-down federal testing was a disaster, the next logical idea seems to be bottom-up reform, right? Give parents 'choice' and let the market work its magic. It sounds so American. Laura: It does sound American. And that's exactly where the reform movement went next. But as Ravitch shows, the story of "choice" is just as complicated and fraught with unintended consequences.

Laura: The idea of school choice is incredibly seductive. It taps into our belief in competition and individual freedom. But Ravitch traces its modern history and finds some uncomfortable roots. The term was first popularized in the South after Brown v. Board of Education as a way for white families to get tuition grants to attend private "segregation academies." Sophia: Oof. That’s a rough start for a reform movement. Laura: It is. But the idea was later picked up by free-market economists like Milton Friedman and rebranded as a way to inject competition into a stagnant public system. This eventually led to the charter school movement, which became the preferred model for "choice." And that brings us to the fascinating and cautionary tale of San Diego in the late 90s and early 2000s. Sophia: What happened in San Diego? Laura: The city hired a new superintendent, a former U.S. Attorney named Alan Bersin, who had no background in education. He brought in Anthony Alvarado, the architect of the reforms in New York's District 2, to be his Chancellor of Instruction. Their plan was to implement a top-down, corporate-style "Blueprint for Student Success." Bersin's motto was, "You don't cross a chasm in two leaps." Sophia: Take no prisoners, basically. Laura: Literally. In one infamous incident, Bersin and Alvarado decided fifteen administrators—mostly principals—were ineffective. They were publicly demoted at a school board meeting, and then immediately escorted to their schools by armed police officers to collect their personal belongings and leave the premises. Sophia: Hold on. Escorted out by armed police? That's not reform, that's an occupation. That's insane! Laura: It sent a shockwave of fear through the entire district. It was a clear message: comply or be eliminated. This is the business model Ravitch critiques so fiercely. It views teachers and principals not as professionals to be developed, but as interchangeable parts in a machine. If a part is defective, you just replace it. Sophia: It’s like they were trying to fix a hospital by just firing a bunch of doctors and hoping for the best. But here's the million-dollar question: did it work? Did the test scores go up? Laura: That's the complicated part. The results were mixed and, ultimately, a huge disappointment. On the national NAEP tests, which are considered the gold standard, San Diego's elementary reading scores did improve, especially for low-income students. But math scores showed no gains at all. And high school scores actually declined relative to the rest of California. Sophia: So they created this climate of fear, alienated the entire teaching force, and for what? A slight bump in fourth-grade reading? Laura: Pretty much. A survey of teachers found that 93% had no confidence in the superintendent, and 63% described morale as "poor." The human cost was immense. One principal, who had built her dream dual-language school, retired in heartbreak after an instructional coach from New York came in and systematically dismantled everything she had built, calling her staff incompetent. Sophia: It's like they polished the chrome on the car while the engine was falling apart. They were so focused on the data and the "Blueprint" that they forgot schools are made of people. Laura: That's the core of Ravitch's argument against the business model. Schools are not franchises. They are complex human communities. A top-down, command-and-control approach might work for turning around a failing corporation, but it can destroy the trust and collaboration that are essential for a healthy school. Sophia: And that's the perfect segue, because who loves a good 'disruptive' business model more than billionaire philanthropists? It feels like they're the ones writing the checks for these kinds of experiments now. Laura: They are. And Ravitch argues this is the new, unelected force driving education reform in America.

Laura: When we talk about the influence of big money in education, we're not just talking about lobbying. We're talking about a handful of massive private foundations—primarily the Gates, Broad, and Walton Family Foundations—that, as Ravitch puts it, now function as a sort of unelected, national school board. Sophia: That’s a heavy charge. How do they wield that much power? Laura: Through strategic, targeted funding. They don't just give money to schools; they fund the entire ecosystem of reform. They support think tanks that produce favorable research, advocacy groups that lobby state legislatures, and training programs for superintendents who will implement their preferred policies. They even funded the U.S. Department of Education to promote their agenda. Sophia: So they're shaping the debate, funding the research, training the leaders, and influencing the government. They've covered all the bases. Laura: Exactly. But to understand the problem with this, it helps to look at a precursor: the Annenberg Challenge from the 1990s. Publishing magnate Walter Annenberg gave a staggering $500 million—over a billion in today's money—to improve public education. Sophia: Half a billion dollars! That must have changed everything, right? Laura: It didn't. The money was spread across 18 sites, and each had its own plan. There was no coherent strategy. When the funding ran out after five years, the whole initiative just... faded away. A study concluded it had no significant, lasting effect on student achievement. It's now seen as a "terrific bad example" of philanthropy. Sophia: So if half a billion dollars couldn't fix it then, what makes today's foundations think they can? What's different now? Laura: The strategy is different. Today's foundations, what some call "venture philanthropies," are far more strategic and prescriptive. They don't just give money; they invest it to advance a very specific agenda. For the Gates, Broad, and Walton foundations, that agenda is overwhelmingly market-based: more charter schools, merit pay for teachers based on test scores, and data systems to measure everything. Sophia: So they learned from Annenberg's failure. Instead of just throwing money at the problem, they're using their money to force a specific solution. Laura: Precisely. Take the Gates Foundation's early obsession with small high schools. They spent over a billion dollars breaking up large high schools into smaller ones. But as Ravitch documents with the story of Manual High School in Denver, it was often a disaster. The new, small schools squabbled over resources, course offerings shrank, and students fled. The foundation eventually admitted that many of the small schools they funded "did not improve students' achievement in any significant way." Sophia: And they just moved on to the next big idea? Laura: They pivoted. Now their focus is on "teacher effectiveness," which sounds great, but in practice often means tying teacher evaluations and pay to volatile student test scores—a method many researchers believe is unreliable and unfair. Sophia: So we're letting a handful of unelected, unaccountable foundations run these massive, multi-billion-dollar experiments on our public schools. And when an experiment fails, they just move on to the next one, with no consequences for them, but huge consequences for the kids and teachers involved. That feels... deeply unsettling. Laura: It's the central democratic dilemma Ravitch raises. These foundations are accountable to no one but their own boards of trustees. Yet they are setting the national agenda for a fundamental public good.

Laura: When you step back and look at the whole picture Ravitch paints, you see this tragic chain of events. It starts with a good idea—creating high standards for all kids. That idea gets corrupted by politics and morphs into a punitive testing regime. The failure of that regime then opens the door for a different, supposedly better solution: market-based choice and competition. Sophia: And that market-based solution is now being bankrolled and scaled up by this small club of immensely powerful, unaccountable private foundations. Each step seemed logical at the time, but the cumulative effect has been to destabilize and undermine the very idea of public education. Laura: Exactly. Ravitch's ultimate conclusion is that these reforms have failed because they are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what education is for. The goal of a school isn't to produce higher test scores like a factory produces widgets. The goal is to educate children to become thoughtful, capable, and responsible citizens. Sophia: So after all this, what does a good school even look like according to Ravitch? If it's not about data and choice, what is it about? Laura: It's about going back to basics, but in the richest sense of the word. She argues the most durable way to improve schools is to focus on curriculum and instruction. And she ends the book with a beautiful, poignant chapter titled, "What Would Mrs. Ratliff Do?" Sophia: Who is Mrs. Ratliff? Laura: She was Ravitch's own high school English teacher in Houston. A gruff, demanding woman who made her students memorize Shakespeare and Shelley, who covered their essays in red ink, and who taught them to love literature and to write with precision and care. She was a teacher who built character and inspired a lifelong love of learning. Sophia: Things you can't measure on a bubble test. Laura: Never. And Ravitch's final, powerful point is that our current reform movement, with its obsession with data and disruption, has no way to value, or even recognize, a teacher like Mrs. Ratliff. We've created a system that might fire her for not raising test scores enough. Ravitch concludes, "Our schools will not improve if we value only what tests measure." Sophia: That really hits home. It makes you think about the teachers who truly made a difference in your own life. I'm sure everyone listening has a "Mrs. Ratliff" story. A teacher who saw something in them, or opened up a new world, in a way a spreadsheet could never, ever capture. We'd love to hear those stories. Share them with us online. Laura: This is Aibrary, signing off.