George Schmidt is a veteran Chicago teacher and writer. I recall that when my 2010 book came out, wherein I renounced my long-held views on testing, accountability, and choice, Schmidt was unimpressed. He gave me a tongue-lashing for being a latecomer to the issues he knew so well. To put it mildly, he was angry at me and suspicious of my sincerity.
In his review of “Reign of Error,” he accepts that I have joined him on the right side of history. This is one of the most thorough and comprehensive analyses of the book and its themes. Among many wonderful comments, this may be the one I treasure most:
“”Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “J’Accuse!” came to my mind very early as I was reading the latest Ravitch book while sitting in front of a bookshelf that includes most of her earlier books. Some writers reach the perfect timing in their lives, and they get to write at the peak of their skills to make points that don’t need to be repeated. Whether it was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s stunning fictional polemic against American chattel slavery, Emile Zola’s confrontation with anti-Semitism in France, or any of the other works we read when we are allowed to learn history, some books arise out of their times but transcend those times by the confrontation they make with the enemies of human freedom and democracy. “Reign of Error” is one of those books.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A beautiful comment, and true.
Reign of Error is a masterpiece that I suspect will be studied in pedagogy, policy, and history courses for years to come.
Diane is a masterpiece who will be studied in advocacy courses for years to come.
This brief blog posting is an example of the honesty and integrity that characterizes this blog.
Read George Schmidt’s reviews of both THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM and REIGN OF ERROR.
I mean it, read both. Then decide if the owner of this blog is trying to give a fair and balanced view of George Schmidt’s attitude toward the positions she used to, and is now, advocating.
Contrast this with the many edufraudulent wonders and miracles, all favorable to the drive to achieve the greatest amount of $tudent $ucce$$ in the shortest amount of time. For example, 100% graduation rates in some charter schools—but ignore the large percentage of students who started out as ninth graders but didn’t make it to twelfth grade. Irrefutable criticisms of same based on the numbers provided by the charterites/privatizes themselves? Ignore, omit, forget, move on…
Again, read the reviews and read the books. I also suggest linking to George Schmidt’s current blog:
Link: http://www.substancenews.net
Another great review. Chapters 16 and 17 were also the real eye-openers for me. I thought I pretty much had a good grasp of what was going on, all the issues, etc. So wrong. Thanks again Diane.
It’s time, I suggest, for teacher book clubs to learn from Reign of Error.
Within the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union, Reign of Error is selling out. Last Wednesday, after the CTU House of Delegates meeting, Karen Lewis arrived at Connie’s Pizza, where many of us go after the union meetings. I had a couple of copies of “Reign of Error” that I have been making available at a lower price than the cover price to colleagues. Karen picked it up and read from her dust jacket blurb to the 40 or so teachers and others there. Then I sold out the rest of the copies I had there then.
The previous weekend, we sold 20 copies we had bought at the CORE “convention.” People are learning about the book one-by-one by word of mouth, and then looking how to get a copy.
Others have asked for it for events today (at the CTU offices) and tomorrow (when I lead a union contract study session at a local library after school).
So here is a thought about a plan.
School by school book clubs reading and studying and sharing ideas on Reign of Error and how to build the democracy we are all working towards.
Norm Scott (Ed Notes) and I discussed (and I kind of outline in that lengthy review I wrote for substancenews.net) that Reign of Error is actually a series of lectures. Each chapter can be studied separately, and together they move forward the momentum of the narrative to the logical conclusions about our forthcoming fights for democracy. (Spring 2014 might turn into “Opt Out” time; it’s too early to know…). The only thing I would hope is that we don’t create too many Power Point versions. Every Chicago Board of Education meeting, the liars use Power Point maliciously to push their latest nonsense.
Beginning yesterday, the CORE “Book Club” that I lead once a month in Chicago (second Tuesday of the month at the Richard M. Daley branch of the Chicago Public Library, 733 N. Kedzie if you are around and interested) shifted from an in depth study of how Chicago segregates to Reign of Error. A city doesn’t get apartheid without a lot of central planning; the Chicago Boys have been at it for generations on this much segregation, but we can get back to that. Right now, we move to “Reign of Error.”
I suspect that study group, which meets at a lovely public library second Tuesday of every month, will have between a dozen and twenty people when we fill it up.
CORE has other study groups around Chicago, and it’s possible that some of those will also pick up Reign of Error. That’s still in the works.
As we prepared our Chicago study group, it struck some of us that every public school should have a group of teachers, students, parents and others who are meeting regularly to study (not just “read” although that’s good) Reign or Error.
in Chicago, some of our fiercest union people are custodial and security workers, who usually come from the communities where the schools are located. Democracy is a really clear reality for all of us in this town.
If even ten percent of the public schools in Chicago organize these events at their schools (and the union can support them), then “Number 10” (the place Reign of Error was last Sunday on The New York Times hard cover best seller list) will be the starting point for an interesting race to the top (of the best seller list).
Although my favorite holiday stories include “Elf” and “The Grinch”, for this holiday I think they should be “down lower” on The Times list. And if teachers and parents across the USA use this opportunity to learn all that Diane’s book has to offer, then we are going to have a good time watching “Reign of Error” pass those two “Duck Dynasty” books currently on the Times hard cover list.
We’ll see.
Teachers are very busy right now, which is why this will be more like a tsunami than an earthquake, building beneath and then sowing all at once.
My wife Sharon, who was early a part of the Resistance here, remembers the days after we were sued for a million dollars for “copyright infringement.” We were sued for publishing some of the most ridiculous secret tests in history — the Chicago CASE tests. (By the way, we never paid a penny of that; CPS came down to zero “damages” after I demanded a jury trial under that overlooked part of the Bill of Rights, the Seventh Amendment. The Chicago Tribune however could resist lying even about that and has on its site that I paid a few bucks to end the case…).
That all happened between 1999 and 2003, and that wave of the Resistance was broken, but not completely terminated.
Jerry Bracey and Monty Neill were the expert witnesses during the hearing on whether CPS should fire me as a teacher for something I published in a newspaper that they admitted was totally separate from my teaching. CPS won that argument, based on “copyright infringement”, a dubious but stunningly neoliberal point of view (that was upheld all the way through the Seventh U.S. Court of Appeals in a 2003 decision that ended my teaching career).
Sharon was reading “Reign of Error” the other night and commented on how easily each of the major points we had been working on for more than a decade was laid out clearly and dealt with in wonderful precision in the book. Because real public school teachers are always super busy this time of year (and Sharon also sponsors the Steinmetz High School newspaper, the Star, another bit of democracy) it’s going to take time for people to acquire, read, and think about the book. That’s why “book clubs” might spread, slowly at first.
As for me, as I’m celebrating the holidays in December with our boys (hopefully, the big guy will come home from Berkeley in December, having successfully launched a career in computers thanks in a large part to his public school education in Chicago — Whitney Young, Class of 2007) and family, we will open The New York Times Sunday national edition (I began reading it when I was a newsboy in Linden, New Jersey in the 1950s) and find that Reign of Error was still high up on the best seller list(s). Teachers can have an impact like that, slowly.
Because we are all busy with so much.
Meanwhile, here in Chicago we are proud of the fact that Diane Ravitch chose Karen Lewis to do the big dust jacket blurb for the book. Karen’s happy about that, too. So we are going to continue to spread copies of the “first edition” and look forward to the next time Diane is in Chicago to speak to a large group of teachers and others.