In case you missed, here is my interview with Tavis Smiley from September 8. It is about 12 minutes. Tavis asked about the Vergara decision and teacher tenure, about the attacks on teachers and public education, about the goals of the current “reform” movement, Common Core, and my judgment of Race to the Top.
All in 12 minutes!
By the way, if you wonder why I was holding my head in last minutes of show, I should explain that I didn’t have a toothache. My earpiece with the audio feed was falling out, and I was holding it in my ear.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Amazing, Dr. Ravitch. You clearly differentiated college professor and K-12 public school teacher tenure. I have faith that the truth will prevail with the public at large. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Also, you looked beautiful!
Thank you! So much makeup I felt like a kabuki player.
My husband watch and commented, “Mr. Deasy should have debated Dr. Ravitch one-on-one. She would have cleaned his clock with her facts and logic.” What a smart man I married!
“watchED”
Diane, you were great. Clear, direct and thorough. And you looked wonderful!
I think public education advocates would do well to stop using the term tenure and instead use “due process”. It’s too big a job to redefine tenure for a public that thinks it already knows what it is. Plus, nobody argues against due process. Well, almost nobody.
That was awesome! It is beyond refreshing to hear the real facts in a mainstream venue. .
You have amazing talent as a communicator.
Direct, clear, coherent, forceful, unambiguous. Quite a twelve minute lesson. Is it any wonder that Rhee ducked out on you?.
I add my praise and gratitude to the others, Dr. Ravitch. We’re with you as long as we have a breath in our bodies. We’ll never give up this fight. Thanks you for your leadership.
Thank you so much.
Excellent! Thank you so much!
Flawless and compelling, great. If we lived in a democracy instead of an oligarchy, you’d be asked to comment in prime time on the major networks side b side with the grand lineup of Rhees, Duncans, Gateses, and Colemans. The other side is afraid to debate you or to broadcast you.
Diane was, not surprisingly, absolutely brilliant – succinct – clear – logical – well informed. What was also troubling about Deasy was that on the air he argued that his main problem seemed to be with the length of time required to get tenure in California. If so, why not simply go for a longer amount of time and not go for destroying the whole process? Of course, Deasy’s comment re: length of time was another sham (outright lie???) In addition, his “last in first out last out” comment was a problem. That was also a sham. And of course, he ignores the role of an administrator in doing their job as far as documenting a problem teacher. As we all know, administrators need to do their job when addressing what they feel is a problem teacher. Oh that’s right, Diane was right again! The issue is due process and Deasy finds this notion to be a problem in a democracy that preserves the rights of an individual.
Tom
Thank you for making our common sense movement understandable for the average viewer:) I loved how you explained tenure!!!
My basic nightmare would be to have thousands of viewers expecting me to overview and explain the problems with so-called education reform in 12 minutes. Up until I viewed this, I didn’t think it could be done. You are definitely not perfect, but I dare anyone else to do better.
Terrific!
Exceptional! Thank-you for getting every critical fact out there in 12 min. You have an amazing memory and a special gift at communicating. Smiley seemed to understand the issues better than most interviewers.
Ms. Ravitch,
Here is a great article that connections to the decimation of the teaching profession–especially as it relates to Black and Latino teachers:
http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/09/the_teacher_wars_book_provides_more_evidence_that_teachers_of_color_matter.html?wpisrc=topstories
Awesome! Tavis almost started laughing when you said that you would give Obama’s race to the top an “F.” Tavis knows. He knows that Obama is a puppet. He and Dr. Cornell West, (my personal hero), have been saying this for years. Deasy is an empty suit. He doesn’t strike me as intelligent (at all) horrible! What a travesty. Veteran teachers are so much better. Tavis gave it to Deasy. He knows what Deasy is about. Dr. Ravitch, you are fighting the good fight. You will go down in history as someone who was willing to fight for “us” teachers. That is something. I am not optimistic about the big picture (money will always win), but you, Tavis, Chris Hedges, Bill Moyers and a few others will go down on the right side of history. Good job! (15 year public school teacher)
My opinion of Tavis Smiley dropped greatly after I watched his July 17th interview with Eli Broad which is on the show website. It is a pandering, pathetic performance. How can he be around Cornell West and be so clueless about what Eli Broad is doing to public education?
The link for the show is here if you want to see the it. http://tinyurl.com/n49nahk
Totally agree, Mike!
Ira Shor is right. If we only lived in a Democracy…. or in the 1950s?
Is that the real Ira Shor? I am impressed. We just need Henry Giroux to comment next. Henry Giroux is my personal hero. He left to Canada years ago. We last few thinking people should follow his example. If not, we all may end up meeting in some common core detention center…
Excellent Ms. Ravitch. Thank you so much!
Thanks for doing this, Diane. You are so articulate, and it’s obvious the data is at your beck and call. You’re truly the right person for such a time as this.
Thank for for dedicating your life to public education! Our children are very fortunate to have you advocating for them. You are a lovely leader and a wonderful speaker!
Very nice! Absolutely accurate and great points. Deasy, in contrast, seemed to talk about nothing. He seemed vague and preachy – maybe Reformers love that.
Knocked it out of the park D!
Great Job! Btw, how many times did Tavis Smiley say the word “conversation”?
Thank you Diane for providing the link to your talk. I especially appreciated your reference to tenure and how teacher tenure differs from university tenure. Great Analogy!
BTW, you are looking good.
Excellent job, Diane!
To show just how inculcated the edudeformer memes are in our daily discourse and how we so easily slip into their language game listen to this quote by Diane “No point ns having standards so high. . . ”
It’s not the “standard” that is so high, but the cut point-the very much political decision to place the cut scores where they are on that imaginary scale of measurement that standardized tests purport to have. And that “standard” is the completely wrong concept with which to base educational/teaching and learning practices on.
It’s so easy to slip into edudeformer language mode and not even realize it.
Why is “standard” the completely wrong concept.
To understand why, read and comprehend Noel Wilson’s never rebutted nor refuted complete destruction of the concept of educational standards “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
By Duane E. Swacker
The bottom line is:
Teachers can scream all they like but NO ONE CARES and NO ONE is LISTENING. (NO ONE meaning the 1% who own America & their followers).
This blog is preaching to the choir. America has the highest CHILD ABUSE, PRISON, and CHILD MENTAL ILLNESS of any industrialized nation and its growing….and NO ONE CARES and NO ONE IS LISTENING! the 1% are not capable of empathy or guilt.
It’s time to stop preaching to the choir and put that effort into a movement that can wake people up. That means educating the masses who have been indoctrinated for too long.
De Mause studies are used in university classes and may be too advanced for mainstream non scientific thinking, but its time to educate the masses:
http://www.psychohistory.com
Thanks, Ken.
The politicians are too busy sucking up to those who fund their campaigns.
Yes, but try not to cut n paste this throughout the blog.
“Psychohistory, the science of historical motivations, combines the insights of psychotherapy with the research methodology of the social sciences to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present.” and “Putting the world on a couch” (from the cited website)
and “may be too advanced for the mainstream non scientific thinking”
Or it just may be too non-scientific to even give it any credence. Giving a cloak of “scientificity” to a study (I have no problem lending it credence as a “social study”) of motivations of historical actors stretches the definition of “scientific study” and/or science itself beyond recognition.
That is not to say that it doesn’t make for an (some) interesting point(s) of view and discussions but I would have a hard time calling it science.