Accountable Talk, a popular education blogger, here reviews Reign of Error.
He or she writes:
The book is a thorough excoriation of the reform movement. Starting with who the major players are and how they stand to benefit financially from their “reforms”, Ms. Ravitch unravels, one by one, all the myths spun by the corporate raiders looking to cash in on public education dollars. She lays bare the truth about all the favorite tropes of the reform movement, such as test scores, the achievement gap, PISA, high school and college graduation rates,
merit pay, and many others….
Perhaps even more important than her expose of the reformers themselves, Ravitch points the way forward. She devotes 100 pages to proposed solutions to what ails public schools, all of which make perfect sense. From pre-natal care to wraparound services, Ms. Ravitch offers common sense solutions that move us away from the blame game so beloved by reformers. She clearly sees teachers as part of the solution, rather than the problem.
I love the fact that his book is coming out at the same time that Bill de Blasio seems poised to become mayor of NYC as the “anti-Bloomberg”. It may just be that the pendulum, which has so long swung towards the reformers, may at last be swinging its way back to teachers, students, parents, and other real stakeholders in the education system.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“It may just be that the pendulum, which has so long swung towards the reformers, may at last be swinging its way back to teachers, students, parents, and other real stakeholders in the education system.”
I’m helping with a local campaign for a bond issue to build new public schools. Our local schools were built in 1916 and renovated in the 50’s and again in the 70’s.
The political discussion is really interesting, because it’s genuinely bipartisan. This is a majority conservative area, so most of the supporters are conservatives, but it’s authentically grass roots and politically diverse.
We held a rally Monday night and the biggest applause line was “we have to do this ourselves”. There’s a real recognition we’ve been abandoned in this ordinary, working class and middle class district. Our state government doesn’t support existing public schools, in word or in deed, and the federal government doesn’t either.
There’s this whole discussion at 30,000 feet about assessing teachers and new curriculum and technology and “racing to the top” and meanwhile, our schools are falling apart. I wonder if there will be more of this, a sort of circling the wagons, as the national narrative goes further and further away from what existing public schools need to survive.
Good morning, Diane. Thought you’d find the article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel interesting…time to only allow the best test takers into our educational colleges, and then link the colleges to the students’ Praxis scores. The climate is so poor for education in Wisconsin that we’re already seeing a shortage in current and future teachers.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/think-tank-calls-for-tougher-admissions-standards-for-education-schools-b99111080z1-226044531.html
“We have to do this ourselves” is beautiful and real and inspiring. Thank you for participating and I hope we can all lend a hand as we re-learn how to do it ourselves, pluck it out of the clouds and bring it back to earth and to our learning children.
“pluck it out of the clouds and bring it back to earth and to our learning children.”
I think at some point they have to be able to point to some tangible benefit of “reform” to the majority of people. It’s been more than a decade. Every year it’s just more mandates and less funding. The funding that does come isn’t towards anything that we find “valuable”. I didn’t ask for an elaborate school grading system that changes every year and I think testing kids in order to evaluate teachers is nutty. I don’t really consider the relationship between my kid and his school to be adversarial or “competitive”. He’s not a “consumer” at school, considering his “options”. He’s an 11 year old. Hopefully they’re working together.
I was flabbergasted at the rhetoric around public employees in Ohio when they went after collective bargaining. I don’t really consider these people my sworn enemies. I don’t know anyone who does. I was right, too. When it went to a vote they got walloped. Rhee campaigned for the gutting of collective bargaining in Ohio. She lost, and by something like 40 points. Am I out of touch or is she? I think she is. Perhaps that’s because I live here and she doesn’t?
Again, so very great to see people fighting back. My fear for a long time, perhaps still is, that quality research – the search for the truth – had been supplanted with political gamesmanship. Hopefully our democracy can still work. Hope so.
Dr. Ravitch, I noticed looking back on the last three chapters that we have written on The MACE Manifesto that we have cited your “Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms” and/or “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education” in each of these chapters. Now you have outdone yourself! I just saw that you have published “Reign of Error,” and I can’t wait to get my hands on it! Mr. Haynes and I consider you the absolute authority on school reform and its failures, as well as the country’s foremost education historian. Teachers are sick to their stomachs when they hear the dreaded words, “school reform.” It’s all a bunch of bullsh-t, and to quote my sweet 88 year old mother, “It’s enough to make you want to chew tobacco.”
We at MACE have been writing about the foolishness of school reform for years, and it’s so refreshing to us, Dr. Ravitch, to see someone of your stature taking it on so forcefully. Thanks! School reform per se has failed big time in the United States. I have known personally for over 30 years that “school reform” was a joke. In fact, when most all the Georgia politicians jumped on the bandwagon of the much-ballyhooed Quality Basic Education (QBE) Act here in Georgia back in the mid-1980s, I ran against the most entrenched Democrat in the State House (Bill Lee who ended up serving, I think, a State record 40 years in the House) in 1986, and I decried the QBE legislation (which, by the way, set up all of the farce of “school reform” in Georgia with the snoopervision of teachers and the use of evaluative instruments in the most manipulative, retributive, and punitive manner). I said on the campaign trail that “QBE” stood for “Quit Being an Educator.”
We’re now trying to wrap up a fairly large tome on public education from our perspective. We hope to contribute to the discussion. Naturally, we have cited your earlier works. They are veritable gems! Here’s a link to a chapter on the evil influence of Bill Gates on public education. We might get a little rough in our language sometimes, but, hey, we’re from Georgia! LOL!
Congratulations, Diane, on what I prefer to see as a Trilogy on the farce of “school reform.”
http://themacemanifesto.com/