In a radical reversal of position, Diane Ravitch now believes that NCLB has failed. Charter schools and standards, programs that she has championed for years, are not the answer to school improvement. Now, she puts her eggs in the teacher quality basket.

Sara Mosle has an excellent review of Ravitch's book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Mosle rightly points out that one of the benefits of NCLB is that it forced schools to put test scores on the record. We now know for sure how badly some schools are doing and how badly certain groups are faring. But that's as far as we go with NCLB. After it identified the bad schools, it could do nothing to change them.

The dirty dark secret of NCLB is that we may know how to identify the
worst performing schools, but no one (yet) knows how to turn them
around in any consistent and reliable way. And I mean no one. Not the
Gates Foundation to date. Not most charter programs. No one.

Ravitch's reversal is front page news. In every policy area, there are a handful of people in the country who really matter. They are political leaders, top academics, the heads of powerful interest groups, and heads of the national bureaucracy. Policies are made by people who have deep knowledge of a topic, have the political power to make things happen, and have the ability to attract the media. Policies are always made by a handful of elites. In education policy, Diane Ravitch is one of those people. She may have single handedly changed the discussion about education.

Stanford economists, Eric Hanushek and Steven Rivkin, are also members of the elite corps in education. Mosle writes that Hanushek and Rivking examined variables that might impact on teacher quality, including certification, general education level, salary. None of those variable predicted whether or not someone would be a good teacher or not. So, those two years that you spent at education school were a waste. However, they also found that good teachers were an extremely significant factor in closing the achievement gap  between low-income and high-income
students.

Good teachers are important, but we just don't know how to make them. 

This is a big story. With health care reform about to pass (fingers crossed), we're about to move on to education. Obama has unveiled new reforms. I'm going to be watching this carefully.

UPDATE: Ben Wildavsky review Ravitch's book in TNR. Ravitch responds.