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Promoting a National Worldview
January 20, 2006
By Julie M. Quist
Diane Ravitch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, and she’s considered an expert in education reform. Her most recent book, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, laments the politically correct censorship in schools of all things traditional or patriotic.
Like so many well-intentioned “reformers,” however, Ravitch is a social engineer. That is, from her ivory tower, she intends to solve the problems in today’s schools by putting herself and her think tank colleagues in charge of what all states should be doing. She was party to the first national history standards published in 1995. In 1996, Ravitch wrote: "50 States, 50 Standards: The Continuing Need for National Voluntary Standards in Education.”
Those of us who read the standards recognized that they were full of revisionist history, undermined our founding principles, and promoted fuzzy math. Our objections were shouted down by Ravitch and others who insisted that the national standards were “voluntary” for states to choose whatever standards they wished.
The intentions of imposing a singular worldview through a centralized curriculum, however, were transparent. Due in large part to the ten-year heroic grassroots resistance to “voluntary” standards, Ravitch is back, this time arguing that states shouldn’t be allowed to set their own standards or monitor their own progress. Enlightened central planners like herself will create curriculum for all, she says, insisting that the standards won’t “involve any political bias.”
But here are a few of her biases: the debate over evolution will be over, once and for all, as evolution is the only real science; the lack of phonics has nothing to do with our kids not learning to read; International Baccalaureate is a wonderful curriculum; the national “fuzzy math” standards are just fine; and “the tradition of local control is a large obstacle to the adoption of national standards.” She brushes Constitutional issues aside.
National standards have always been about a political worldview. Ravitch is on the wrong side of that battle.
Julie Quist is an education researcher and analyst, Vice-President and Political Director of EdWatch and Editor of EdWatch Newsletter.
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