I do my best to explain the assault on public education. It is unprecedented in American history. Public schools have always had critics, but never has there been a calculated effort to replace public schools with privately managed schools. And let’s be frank: that movement has succeeded because of bipartisan support and the availability of hundreds of millions–or billions, if you include Race to the Top–in government and private funding to undermine public education.
Here is a new interview, this one with “District Administration.”
Make no mistake. We can stop this movement if we recognize what is happening and unite.
Join your local or state group to support public education.
Contact the Network for Public Education, and we will help you find a state or local pro-public school group.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on nytechprepper.
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Our unions need to step up the heat as well.
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They’d be burning their own arses if they were to turn up the heat!
The union membership needs to replace the union leadership a la K. Lewis in Chitown.
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I like the comment that mentions P. T. Barnum. If P. T. Barnum were alive today, you can bet he’d be in on the charter racket somehow.
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Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
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Great interview! Changing the narrative is a challenge! You’ve got lots of educators and bloggers who are doing their part to spark “A growing movement that will cause the politicians to say, “We really have to have change” …and to get the public to understand
there “is a national effort to undermine public education, to make people think that it stinks and anything is better than having community public schools.”
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Been thinking about how ed reformers are cutting funding to public schools while pushing “blended learning” so hard. We know class sizes have been growing under reformers, and public schools have taken huge funding cuts under ed reform leadership at the state level:
“This year as Rayer develops his non-profit model at Merit Prep, his school is overstaffed with a 13-to-1 student-teacher ratio.
But he says technology should allow him to increase that. He won’t put a number on it but his description of becoming 25 to 30 percent more efficient than a typical school could mean as many as 40 students per teacher.
“That is not the point of what we’re doing,” said Rayer. “But if this worked and a teacher could serve more students at a highly effective level, we would do that.”
Even some technology advocates like Doug Levin of the State Educational Technology Directors Association doubt that this model will ever appeal to middle- and upper-income families whose children are not struggling below grade level.
Levin says that’s because those children don’t need as much extra drilling and can use more of the school day for analysis and inquiry.”
If one reads the lobby shop marketing materials on blended learning “efficiency” is mentioned a lot (Jeb Bush’s lobbying group, for example). Yet it’s not sold to PARENTS using “efficiency”, instead it’s sold as “individualized learning” (Duncan uses this sales tool). Jeb Bush is selling to government leaders and Duncan is selling to parents. Two different target markets. The key here is who they are targeting with the sales pitch. When they’re selling to governments (state or city leaders) they sell “efficiency”, when they’re selling to parents they use “individualized learning”. I think we have to remember that there is a dual sales pitch going on here. All government contractors (charter schools would be the contractor here) sell to GOVERNMENT, not citizens.
I think it helps to understand ed reform if we first figure out who they’re selling to when they use various pitches or tactics. There’s two tracks, because there’s tow target markets.
http://hechingerreport.org/content/in-new-jersey-teachers-union-fights-blended-learning_10705/
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I put my name in to get on a “tech” committee in my local district. I have it be confirmed by the school board so I don’t know if I’m on it yet.
I’d like to see first-hand how ed reform (particularly blended learning) is being sold by private contractors, not how it’s sold to the general public or parents but to government- in this case the government entity receiving the sales pitch by the private contractor would be my school board.
It helps me to unravel this is a bit if I look at ed reform orgs and entities as government contractors, which is also how Ohio courts have classified them in several lawsuits, so I’m not the only one 🙂
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I’ve posted Diane’s words here as her New Year’s message to us. Perfect summary of where we’re at, & cal to action for us. I truly believe we have just begun to turn this corner; that the war is going to heat up against us, but that we are starting to come together with our natural allies (just about everyone except the rich & powerful) and that 2014 will go down in history as one in which the tide turned. Happy New Year to our wonderful Diane, and to each and all of us.
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Diane,
I read this blog faithfully, but until I clicked on the link in this post I was not aware of how much the NPE website has grown since I last visited the site around the time of the launch.
Especially interesting is the map of friends and allies. I’ve been searching for a regional listing of public school advocates, and lo and behold, there it is on the NPE site:
http://www.networkforpubliceducation.org/npe-friends-allies-2/
Perhaps you could do a blog post highlighting the efforts of the NPE so far, and include an explanation of the friends and allies map (selection criteria for those already included, and the process for interested parties to be added.)
Please don’t be afraid to use your blog to publicize your NPE work–this reader, at least, would be very interested to know what is going on at the NPE.
Thanks for all you do!
Concerned Citizen
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One can hardly disagree with any of Diane’s clear and articulate description of the wrongs being done to public education in the name of budget cuts. Where she goes off the track, however, in my opinion, is in attempting to make its remedy for those wrongs, a federal remedy. She says:
“There are many more issues that are more salient to them because education is, theoretically at least, not a federal responsibility.”
Indeed education is NOT a federal responsibility and shouldn’t be. Phrases like “grass roots” and “solidarity” are drawn from the world of union politics. When Lech Walesa in Poland was leading a union movement against Russian communism, we could all say “Solidarnosch” and mean it, but what Diane is promoting is, at the deepest reality, pro-government and statist, socialist and communist.
She wants to regain control of the education purse by state means. That in my view is deeply antithetical to fundamental American values. The grass roots movement is already well under way, and it is called the tea party. We only have to look at Obamacare to realized the potential for disaster lurking in every well-intentioned federal program. It OUGHT to have clarified for us after the failures of NCLB, RTTT, and CCSS, that federal leadership of education is equally as destructive as it is in health care. From my point of view, the ONLY way to fix Obamacare is to repeal it, completely. Likewise, from my point of view the ONLY way permit American education to operate effectively is to eliminate the education department. But that’s too radical for most people—at the moment.
Diane did have a moment of enlightenment, but she drew the wrong conclusion from it. She wants DIFFERENT federal planning and political pressure to achieve it, but not less federal responsibility, not just for education but for the economy and poverty as well. She thinks taxing the rich more will provide the money necessary. That is her fundamental error of insight into economics. Not education per se, but into the FUNDING of education.
The country as a whole, I am convinced, has concluded that there is NO way to reform the federal government, to put it back on the right track, either in health care, or education. The only practical remedy is to apply the Jeb Bush recipe of destruction of the public schools in favor of private enterprise solutions, even though as Diane continues to show us, many of those solutions, to put it gently, underserve the most needy kids among us.
Diane is clearly one of the good guys, and wears a white hat, but she’s riding in the wrong direction, in my opinion. One cannot diminish poverty by government action, only by the private sector being unleashed to achieve growth and more jobs. In compassion and handouts there lies only disaster. A sense of self-worth and confidence can ONLY be built by achievement in private sector jobs. But aligning herself with private sector promotion is contrary to her world view. She should be promoting charters and vouchers rather than attacking them. She should be aligning herself with “smaller government” political forces rather than big government forces.
The federal government should get out of the business of trying to control education in the states, completely. Let the federal government do the things that the constitution requires it to do, national defense, a national court structure supporting state courts, and adopting policies for sound money. Beyond that, let the people pursue their own interests and get out of the way of their doing it.
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The Tea Party’s misstep is turning to the private sector – big business – to “right” the government’s “wrongs”. The Tea Party is pretty much a wholly-owned subsidiary of big business/the ownership class. The government and the private sector (big business) are in bed together, so neither one is going to help right now. The people taking over their own government is the only way out of this mess. If and when that ever happens, then we can restore some of those regulations that kept them separate in the first place.
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And who are the “people”? It usually means “workers” as in ‘Workers of the World Unite.’ But that is so proletarian and ignorant. Everyone depends on “business” for their livelihood. You seem to imply a workers’ paradise in your critique of the tea party as the creature of ‘big business.’ I don’t think it is under plutocratic control in the least (my tea party ‘cell’ is mostly fat farmers worried about taxes), but even if it were, one can’t have a job without someone to employ you, businesses large and small. How else does one live oh, ‘worker of the world’ ? This hostility to business betokens a mindset that leads to tyranny because the ‘party’ representing the ‘workers’ becomes the elite. “Some animals are more equal than others” Orwell includes in Animal Farm. That means that in place of the “owners” the elites of the “leaders” takes over. Obama is a perfect example. The common man’s champion living rich at the public expense as if he were entitled to by his leadership and administrative judgement. Not all business is perfect, but there’s a lot in government that needs reforming or eliminating.
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