Blogger Perdido Street School reviewed “Reign of Error” and said that he would be giving it to his friends and family who got their views from Oprah and the Today Show. He might have added NBC’s “Education Nation” and many other outlets in the mainstream media that spread misinformation about our nation’s public schools.

 

He writes:

Those are the people we want to read this book and to become familiar with Ravitch’s arguments.

Those are the people the reformers want to keep fooled into believing charter schools, merit pay, online schooling, firing teachers and all the other corporate reforms they are promoting make the system better rather than push it toward their ultimate goal – privatization.

Here is a maxim: Public policy should be based on evidence and experience, not hunches and hopes and wishful theories.