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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2010 > March > 09
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Martin Gottlieb: Finn loses ally to the left — or the right
If people set out to improve longstanding institutions and ways, they will most likely make things worse. That used to be a premise of American conservatism, as promoted, say, in mid-century by William F. Buckley’s National Review magazine. The mission statement of that magazine — the fountainhead of the conservative movement — said the magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”
Then the conservatives changed. Fear of change gave way to an ideology about how society and government should be structured. All change in the direction of ideological purity was suddenly good.
Take education policy. Confronting a public school tradition, the conservative changers were for everything their ideology could imagine and tolerate: school choice, merit pay for teachers, charter schools, more testing, more “accountability,” mayoral control of school systems, you name it.
The old notion that change-seekers tend to mess things up transmuted into liberals mess things up. That formulation proved emotionally satisfying to some, but it lacked the old elegance, the foundation in human nature, the insight that fallibility is general.
All of which is preface to this:
Those who have followed the modern debate over education policy — especially in Dayton — know the name Chester “Checker” Finn Jr. A local boy, he became assistant secretary of education, a leading conservative voice on school issues and a promoter of charter schools, especially in Dayton. The Washington-based Fordham Foundation, a think tank he heads, has adopted Dayton and Ohio as test cases.
Often when his name has been mentioned, the name Diane Ravitch has been not far behind. She’s been a colleague in arms, a co-author and a friend, also with a Fordham connection.
Well, educational policy circles are now abuzz — yes, these people do buzz with the best of them — over the fact that Ravitch, a greatly respected researcher and writer, has flipped on him. Not that she has turned him over to the authorities with allegations of cooked books or anything. But flipped ideologically speaking.
She’s out with a book called “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” in which she lays out how and why she has become disillusioned with the school reforms that she and Finn have pushed so successfully.
She now believes the politicians should pretty much leave the public schools alone. She also believes public schools are the best hope, rather than alternatives.
Finn, too, has found the reform experience somewhat chastening. Some years ago he offered the memorable line, “This is hard,” about building charters that are better than public schools. That might not sound like much of an admission, but you have to understand where some conservatives started: give a principal a baseball bat and watch test scores rise.
Even now Finn and Ravitch have much in common. In response to her book, he writes (in a blog at the Fordham site):
“We … share a number of disappointments and frustrations. … ‘Accountability’ has turned to test-cramming and bean-counting, often limited to basic reading and math skills. That emphasis, in turn, has diverted what was already weak-kneed attention to history, literature, art, etc. … NCLB (No Child Left Behind, the main federal school program) has brought as many problems as solutions. … Charter schools are uneven at best. …
“A lot of innovations and reforms … have failed … — hence our essentially-flat test scores and graduation rates these past three decades — and some have had malign side effects.”
Where they disagree: He wants to get bolder and more insistent with reforms; she wants to turn back.
Finn has referred to his own prescription as “blow it up,” where the pronoun refers to the public school system.
Which brings us back to conservatism.
“Blow it up?”
So let’s see. Ravitch, a former Democrat (married to the Democratic lieutenant governor of New York) first moves to the political right, embracing free-market based solutions and siding with anti-union forces. Then, after long testing of these ideas, moves back in the other direction.
And yet, to see her latest move as that supposedly rare case of an older person (71) becoming more liberal is to miss something. Ravitch has embraced the insight of earlier conservatives about how trying to fix something that’s stable and traditional often makes it worse.
Complicating the ideological picture is this: the Finn-Ravitch educational reforms were eventually embraced to some degree by the political center including, now, the Barack Obama administration, which Ravitch criticizes it for.
So we have, from right to left, Finn, Obama and Ravitch.
Or is it left to right?
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