Imagine Sarah Palin acknowledging offshore drilling is a threat to the Alaskan environment.

That’s what you’ve got when education historian Diane Ravitch writes a book to say that “testing and choice are undermining education.”

“The Death and Life of the Great American School System” is Ravitch’s book-length admission that she championed flawed approaches to school reform. The former assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush takes a soul-searching look at the reality behind the rhetoric of accountability, standards, charter schools and more. After decades of extolling choice and market-based approaches as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Ravitch reaffirms what she knew but had lost sight of: There are no quick fixes, no silver bullets, no easy solutions for American schools.

“I too had jumped aboard a bandwagon, one festooned with banners celebrating the power of accountability, incentives and markets. I too was captivated by these ideas,” she writes.

“They promised to end bureaucracy, to ensure that poor children were not neglected, to empower poor parents, to enable poor children to escape failing schools and to close the achievement gap between rich and poor, black and white. … I wanted to believe that choice and accountability would produce great results. But over time, I was persuaded by accumulating evidence that the latest reforms were not likely to live up to their promise. The more I saw, the more I lost the faith.”

Ravitch’s quest to separate promises from results should be a wake-up call for policymakers in Indiana, whose recent initiatives are copied from the playbook of disproved approaches: End social promotion, create voucher programs, encourage the development of charter schools. Those initiatives haven’t produced achievement gains, she effectively shows, and in some cases, they have created other, undesirable effects. As the charter movement has flourished, for example, more and more urban Catholic schools have closed.

In a telephone interview last week, just days after U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan unveiled a proposal for the K-12 education law reauthorization, Ravitch sounded particularly discouraged. She suggests an unprecedented attack on public education is under way, with the Obama administration carrying on failed policies in promoting a business approach to education. The reauthorization plan is “No Child Left Behind Lite,” she said. The previous plan should have been scrapped and the process started anew.

Ravitch places little faith in Duncan, who as superintendent of Chicago schools closed struggling schools and opened new ones.

“They had the chutzpah to call it “Renaissance 2010,” she said. “They were going to produce these wonderful schools. It has not produced a renaissance. The lowest-performing schools are still among the nation’s lowest-performing schools.”

Indeed, the Chicago Tribune reported results of an analysis this year that show academic performance at the new schools in Chicago is about the same or worse than that at the existing schools.

In the book, Ravitch traces her philosophical journey alongside the attack on public education. She finds the impetus for the attack – cloaked in the current reforms – rooted in the 1983 “A Nation at Risk” report from the National Commission on Excellence in Education, a panel headed by then-U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel Bell. The landmark report detailed a “crisis” in U.S. education and called for higher standards for student academic performance and conduct, higher standards for entry into the teaching profession and higher salaries for teachers. But Ravitch argues that the report was misappropriated to support aims it did not condone.

“ ‘A Nation at Risk’ was notable for what it did not say,” she writes. “It did not support or even discuss … vouchers and school prayer. It did not refer to market-based competition and choice among schools; it did not suggest restructuring schools or school systems. … Instead it addressed problems that were intrinsic to school, such as curriculum, graduation requirements, teacher preparation and the quality of textbooks; it said nothing about the governance or organization of school districts, because these were not seen as causes of low performance.”

But what followed was a rush by the states to set unattainable goals, in many cases borrowing corporate models used to spur sales and profits. Texas was one of those states, and its governor, George W. Bush, carried its flawed accountability plan to Washington when he was elected president, calling it “No Child Left Behind.” The punishing mandates prescribed in the federal law gave politicians and business leaders the opening to seize education reform and remake it as they pleased. Ravitch’s book details the unimpressive results in New York City, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg took over the schools.

DéjÀ vu reform

The New York City experience is hauntingly familiar to anyone following public education in Indiana. There is the unquestioned premise that charter schools are superior to traditional public schools. There’s the move to assign letter grades to schools. There was Bloomberg’s push to end social promotion in third grade, an effort he eventually extended to all grades. While it sounded good in theory, Ravitch writes, there was no change in practice because standards dropped.

Then there’s this passage:

“The (New York City) DOE hired a group of British educators to perform quality reviews of every school … but little attention was given to helping schools do a better job. The bottom line of accountability was rewards (for higher test scores) and sanctions (for not getting higher scores).”

Educators at Fort Wayne Community Schools and East Allen County Schools, where the Great Britain-based Cambridge Group reviewed struggling schools in October, might want to read Ravitch’s account for a preview of what could be ahead under the Indiana DOE – not a school-change strategy, she writes, but a “school-shutdown strategy.”

Ravitch cites the misguided role the “Billionaire Boys’ Club” has had in recent reforms, singling out the Bill & Melinda Gates, Walton family and Eli Broad foundations for directing education policy by dangling millions before cash-starved schools.

“There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society’s wealthiest people,” she writes. “They are not subject to public oversight or review, as a public agency would be. They have taken it upon themselves to reform public education, perhaps in ways that would never survive the scrutiny of voters in any district or state.”

While she now refutes some positions she once defended, Ravitch has been a strong and consistent voice for national standards and curriculum, which she argues must serve as a road map. Most important, she has decried the emphasis on math and science and championed a well-rounded curriculum, one that includes “history, geography, literature, the arts, the sciences, civics, foreign languages, health and physical education.”

“Every child ought to be in a school where a grown-up says there must be arts, history and more,” she said from her Brooklyn office. “Somehow, what is missing from all of this business approach is the question of ‘what are the goals of education?’ This drives business people crazy because it’s not quantifiable. They drove the economy into the hole with all of their ‘quants.’ Maybe what they need are some ‘quals’ – for quality.”