Via Jerry Becker's List: Ravitch: 'A moment of national insanity'
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From the Washington Post / The Answer Sheet [A School Survival Guide for Parents (And Everyone Else], March 1, 2011. See http://voices.washingtonpost. com/answer-sheet/diane- ravitch/ravitch-a-moment-of- national-i.html
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Ravitch: 'A moment of national insanity'
By Valerie Strauss
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This was written by education historian Diane Ravitch [http://www.dianeravitch.com/] for her Bridging Differences blog [http://blogs.edweek.org/ edweek/Bridging-Differences/], which she co-authors with Deborah Meier on the Education Week website. Ravitch and Meier exchange letters about what matters most in education. Ravitch, a research professor at New York University, is the author of the bestselling "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," [http://www.amazon.com/Death- Great-American-School-System/ dp/0465014917] an important critique of the flaws in the modern school reform movement.
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Dear Deborah,
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Dear Deborah,
I'm beginning to think we are living in a moment of national insanity. On the one hand, we hear pious exhortations about education reform, endlessly uttered by our leaders in high political office, corporate suites, foundations, and the media. President Obama says we have to "out-educate" the rest of the world to "win the future."
Yet the reality on the ground suggests that the corporate reform movement --- embraced by so many of those same leaders, including the president --- will set American education back, by how many years or decades is anyone's guess. Sometimes I think we are hurtling back a century or more, to the age of the Robber Barons [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Consider a few events of the past week:
In Detroit, the school system will reduce its deficit by closing half the city's public schools and placing students into classes of 60 [http://voices.washingtonpost.
The school board of Providence, Rhode Island, sent notice to all of its teachers that they could be terminated at year's end to address its deficit [http://voices.washingtonpost.
And the business leaders in Idaho have a plan to lay off 770 teachers and replace them with online learning. Do they know there is no evidence for the efficacy of virtual learning? I don't think they care. For them, this is just a cost-cutting measure. And it's other people's children who will get this bargain basement training, not their own.
If more was needed to strip away the mask of "reform," consider the deafening silence of the corporate school reformers in response to these events. A few, like Joe Williams of Democrats for Education Reform [http://www.dfer.org/], surprised their confreres (and me) by siding with the teachers of Wisconsin.
Most, however, complained that public employees are overpaid, have unnecessarily rich benefits, and need a comeuppance. All those who wrote such articles enjoy comfortable upper-middle class lives; do they want to reduce teachers to penury? Some circulated spurious claims that Wisconsin's schools were dreadful, because only one-third of eighth-graders were proficient on National Assessment of Educational Progress reading in 2009 [http://nces.ed.gov/
I was disappointed when my friend Rick Hess, who blogs for Education Week [http://blogs.edweek.org/
The corporate reformers have done a good job of persuading the media that our public schools are failing because they are overrun by bad teachers, and these bad teachers have lifetime tenure because of their powerful unions. (See the corporate reform film, "Waiting for Superman" - http://voices.washingtonpost.
National Board Certified Teachers [http://www.nbpts.org/] are organizing a march on Wadhington this July to fight back against the vilification of their profession. Their website is http://www. saveourschoolsmarch.org./
In the wake of the attacks on teachers and public schools this past year, the haters of teachers feel respectable as they write their venomous diatribes and post them widely. When I recently defended teachers and their right to bargain collectively on CNN.com [http://articles.cnn.com/2011-
So much madness on the loose. So many districts firing teachers and closing schools. So many legislators slashing education budgets while refusing to raise taxes on millionaires or allowing taxes on the wealthiest expire as they layoff teachers.
What do we hear from the corporate reformers? Merit pay. Really? Bonuses for some, layoffs for others? Fire teachers with low value-added scores? Ah, more teaching to the test, more narrowing the curriculum.
Nothing to improve education. Just "innovation" (i.e., no evidence) and "disruption" (I.e., firing the whole staff, closing the school).
Our schools remain subject to a failed federal accountability system. We are packing children into crowded classrooms, ignoring the growing levels of child poverty (the United States now leads all advanced nations in infant mortality, according to Charles Blow in The New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/
Diane
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