The death and life of the great American school system

What Hacker News says

1. swordswinger12Oct 2012
   The author of the blog itself, Diane Ravitch, wrote a very interesting book called "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" on the topic of education reform. I'd encourage HNers to pick it up if this piqued their curiosity.
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2. mturmonJul 2020
   You claimed that "the data shows they work" and I was pushing back against that because it is false. Charters failed in LAUSD, the second-largest school system in the US.

   It was honestly tried here, with the backing of several successive mayors, and donations from several rich foundations and billionaires. It turned out the profit motive wasn't as helpful in this setting as abstract speculation had supposed. Speaking personally, I used to defend charters but I changed my mind after this record of failure.

   As long as we're linking books, here's this book reference from Diane Ravitch (https://dianeravitch.com/about-diane/):

   During the 1980s and 1990s and into the early years of the twenty-first century — as a writer, professor, assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush, and member of prestigious conservative think tanks, such as the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the Koret task force at the Hoover Institution — Diane Ravitch was a leading advocate of conservative ideas for fixing America’s education system, including charter schools, standards, accountability, and high-stakes standardized testing. But about 2006-07, she began to realize that these policies were not working. She began to criticize them, and to criticize the federal “No child left behind” law, with the publication of the book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, she became one of the most outspoken critics of ideas she once championed.

   Here's a short article of hers showing how for-profit charters in New York City managed to co-opt the education agenda of the mayor: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/03/27/new-york-charters-a...

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3. Alex3917Apr 2014
   Yeah Ravitch talks about this in her Death and Life of the Great American School System book, in Chapter 10 on p. 207. That page and a bunch of the previous pages are available to read for free on Amazon. The basic gist though is that all the research shows that medium-sized high schools are the best for students, because they're big enough that students can find classes and activities (and friends) they're interested in, but not so big that they get lost. But despite this research Gates decided to make having extremely small high schools his main educational priority, with results that were basically exactly what the research previously suggested they would be.
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4. Alex3917Apr 2013
   For what it's worth Hanushek is most famous for his theory that a student having a teacher in the 85th percentile or better for test score improvement for five years in a row would be enough to close the gap between low-SES and high-SES kids, a theory which has been soundly disproven. I have no idea about the quality of his other research, but I'd tread with extreme caution there.

   edit: C.f. The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch, the paperback edition, esp. chapters 6 - 9 and the epilogue.

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