In front a crowd of students, professors, members of the Vermont School Boards Association and Gov. Peter Shumlin, D-Vt., Ravitch discussed a number of faulty education policies and methods.
"We're living through an era of hoaxes," she said.
Ravitch said she had immediately questioned the over-arching goal of No Child Left Behind, which aimed to bring all students to math and reading proficiency by 2014, and recalled asking Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., if he believed this target was reachable. The senator replied "No," but added that it was important to have goals.
She then criticized Race to the Top, which she said was implemented without examining evidence or research. The initiative has demoralized teachers and principals, overwhelming them with the burden of teaching for standardized tests.
Both policies do exactly what they aim to prevent, and instead of supporting all children, teachers often neglect those with disabilities because they are more likely to struggle with standardized tests, despite the additional attention they receive.
These initiatives have had the biggest impact on affluent students, leading to a major gap between the wealthy and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, Ravitch said.
"The problem with all of this is that the hoax is an abandonment of a very basic principal called the equality of educational opportunity," Ravitch said. "We are moving toward a market-based system where there will be a few winners and a lot of losers."
Ravitch refuted the common belief that private schools always perform better than their public counterparts. As an example, she spoke about the introduction of a voucher system in the Milwaukee public school system that was intended to increase competition at existing public and charter schools. Ultimately, test scores from all three types of institutions public, private and charter were stagnant, and Milwaukee remained one of the worst performing cities in the nation.
She criticized the belief that school systems should evaluate and weed out bad teachers. While Ravitch agreed teachers need to be evaluated, she said the current system relies too heavily on test scores to accomplish this goal.
"It creates an incentive for teachers to avoid the kids with the highest needs because they're at risk of getting a bad evaluation," Ravitch said.
One possible solution is to allow teachers to write their own tests, which would help them monitor students' progress on an individual basis.
Ravitch maligned the view that poverty should not be an excuse for poor results.
"Is this America?" Ravitch said. "What kind of craziness is this, that we should be ignoring the fact that children are living in terrible conditions and pretend that if we had enough great teachers, we could overcome poverty?"
Jessica Fedin '17, who attended the lecture, agreed with many of the points that Ravitch highlighted.
"It's just a really pertinent issue to today's day and age," Fedin said. "Education isn't as top notch as we'd like it to be."
While Fedin said that changes are needed to public education, she recalled a school in her hometown that should have been closed due to its poor performance, which Ravitch argued against in her talk.
Shumlin introduced the lecture by speaking about his own schooling experience, and described how his struggle with dyslexia influenced his views on education.
"Reign of Error: Responding to the Assault on Public Education" was sponsored by the Rockefeller Center.
