Many years ago, Deborah Meier and I used to be antagonists. She was a progressive and I was a conservative. But in 2004 or 2005, we started blogging together, exchanging posts each week in which we practiced “Bridging Differences.” She (and events) turned me around. I have often said, half in jest, that anyone who spends five years blogging with Debbie Meier will eventually be converted.
I was thrilled to receive Debbie’s wonderful review of the book. Her response means a great deal to me. I look up to her as a champion of children, a lover of education, and a true apostle of democracy.
Here is a sample:
Reign of Error lays out step by step the relentless thirty year drive to ether centralize the education of the young—on one hand—or divest it entirely into privatized hands on the other. Finally, the two sides have joined forces on a strategy that simultaneously does both. While this coalition has many old roots, in its current form it began with the fanfare around the publication of A Nation at Risk (1983). Ravitch was, at that time, a supporter of this bold statement that more or less accused America’s teachers and school boards of a plot to undermine American health and welfare onthe international scene….
And in the past few years Diane’s change of mind has been a particular blessing. She hasn’t, as her preset opponents claim, done a complete switch at all—she was always pro-union, pro-public education and always for standards. Fairly traditional ones. (In fact, her criticism of Progressive educators was that so many had abandoned all standards, she believed.)
Then lo and behold: no one has pulled it all together better than Diane—over and over again in the past few years she has led the challenge to the corporate reformers—right , center and left.. Her last two books Reign of Error and The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) pull it altogether…..
Thanks, Diane. We all need to keep this book handy so we can whip out the citations to make our case for the kind of reform America really needs, in your own words: “to prepare citizens with the minds, hearts and character to sustain our democracy into the future.”
Does Diane have an audience? Are all the reviews (positive and negative) “much ado about nothing”?
For denizens of Planet Reality and RheeWorld, I offer the following:
Diane Ravitch/REIGN OF ERROR (hardcover) on Amazon, 7:25 AM, PST:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #104 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#1 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Children’s Studies
#1 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Public Affairs & Policy
#3 in Books > Education & Reference > Schools & Teaching > Education Theory > Reform & Policy
Michelle Rhee/RADICAL (hardcover) on Amazon, 7:27 AM, PST:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #78,168 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#47 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Educators
I don’t know about the disparity—maybe “education reformers” eat too many bees?
🙂
Update: 12:30 pm EST:
#92 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Linda: you beat me to it!
🙂
Diane Ravitch/REIGN OF ERROR (hardcover) on Amazon, 10:06 AM, PST:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #92 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#1 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Children’s Studies
#1 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Public Affairs & Policy
#3 in Books > Education & Reference > Schools & Teaching > Education Theory > Reform & Policy
Michelle Rhee/RADICAL (hardcover) on Amazon, 10:13 AM, PST:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #83,964 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#56 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Educators
“Men lie and women lie but numbers don’t.” [Dr. Steve Perry, channeling rapper Jay-Z]
Go figure.
🙂
Update, 3:58 pm EST
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #69 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Update 6:26 PM ET:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #54 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
I do not think that self-styled “education reformers”—including Michelle Rhee & Ron Paul—are going to like the expanded debate that REIGN OF ERROR will ensure.
Diane Ravitch/REIGN OF ERROR (hardcover) on Amazon, 4:48 PM, PST:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #54 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#1 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Public Affairs & Policy
#1 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Children’s Studies
#2 in Books > Education & Reference > Schools & Teaching > Education Theory > Reform & Policy
Michelle Rhee/RADICAL (hardcover) on Amazon, 4:50 PM, PST:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #66,084 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#41 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Educators
Ron Paul /THE SCHOOL REVOLUTION (hardcover) on Amazon, 4:56 PM, PST:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #24 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#1 in Books > Education & Reference > Schools & Teaching > Education Theory > Reform & Policy
#2 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Ideologies & Doctrines > Conservatism & Liberalism
#2 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Commentary & Opinion
The ed debates are now escaping the control of the MSM, corporate commentators, and educational & financial establishments.
They don’t like the way things are going? Let them test the “power of their ideas” against relevant data, logic and democratic principles.
Here’s a RHEE-ADICAL idea: invite Diane Ravitch and like-minded defenders of public education and democratic ideals into the media forums and spotlight from which they have been marginalized and excluded up to now.
Free market place of ideas? Let the games begin!
🙂
What gets me is how does Ron Paul have any credentials in this space? Even Rhee has some credentials, but Ron Paul? Methinks it’s his sizable lapdog following that’s propelling his book, not aptitude in the subject matter.
By the way, Reign of Error is now at #49.
I like that last part: “We all need to keep this book handy so we can whip out the citations to make our case for the kind of reform America really needs.” This is what new educators need to hear, that you need to have citations at the ready when someone is telling you to implement a policy you don’t agree with. Diane Ravitch is a blessing to teachers because she empowers them to back up their beliefs with good research. Spot on!
🙂
My sons (both Chicago Public Schools students) came home last night from the 9th birthday party we held for Josh to find the first ten copies of Reign of Error we’d purchased had arrived. Big box on the porch. They were hoping it was another birthday event, but…
So.. a triple play:
— Josh had a great birthday
— The Sox won behind Quintana (our Sox actually have some of the best pitching in Major League baseball, but it’s been a challenge everywhere else this season)…
— And I had something to read into the wee hours (having finished up what I could do with Jim Horn’s book Mismeasure of Education).
It’s a wonderful “read” — and I say this from the perspective of having gotten some time off this summer reading Carl Haiison’s novels.
In addition to what we have been expecting, I was really glad to see that we are going to be discussing desegregation again. “The greatest forward movement for desegregation — and the most significant narrowing of the achievement gap — occurred when the federal government and the federal courts worked in concert to integrate schools…” (Reign of Error, 293).
Without neglecting the other points being made in the book, I don’t think we can miss this incredible fact. The increase in segregation in the past 25 years across the country has been masked in a way by the rise of the “Race To The Top” generation of carefully groomed and sponsored political entrepreneurs of the anti-segregation crowd: Cory Booker, Adrian Fenty, Duvall Patrick, and of course Barack Obama.
While there will be much much more to say, having watched as Chicago ruthlessly used “standards” to wipe out a generation of veteran teachers (most were black, but there were others, like myself, who chose to continue teaching in Chicago’s viciously segregated ghetto schools) with the support of the well subsidized clamorists for “choice”, I can only say it’s time this important social reality be back on the agenda.
And with Diane’s help, we can do it. For a year, I’ve been leading a CORE discussion group called “How Chicago Segregates.” It began with the reading of “The Warmth of Other Suns”, the book about the Great Migration. But now we are getting into the minute details of how Chicago’s plutocracy created the most massively segregated city in the Northern Hemisphere.
And to end this little note:
White and “other” kids are deprived by this as well. When our middle son, Sam, was heading into kindergarten, we had to work to find a public school up here on the city’s Northwest Side that had some black kids in it. By then, Chicago had been slowly rolling back the gains from the desegregation years. Sam and Josh both attend O.A. Thorp, which has a magnet program remaining from the days before the federal courts held Chicago doesn’t need to be watched to make sure deseg continues, so they haven’t been forced into that perverted social reality that segregation creates for all kids.
Their elder brother, Dan (now a computer worker out in the Bay Area) got a more integrated public school education because back in the days when he was coming through the school system, desegregation was required, so the elementary school and the high school he went to had black kids (his high school, Whitney Young was less than half white, and white kids were the minority on the championship baseball teams for which he pitched).
The appeal to justice and equity also includes the reality of desegregation. Thanks for making that a major part of this discussion, too.
“The Sox won”
Maybe they’ll catch up to the Ositos, eh!
From Orlando Cepeda: “Viva el Birdos”
http://teachertomsblog.blogspot.fr/2013/09/no-matter-what-happened-tuesday.html#.Ujmhd61ADvk.facebook Have you seen this review – I guess you have.
She spoke at my school (Dominican Univ) two years back, and then you were at Elmhurst close by last week – I feel lucky to have heard you both in person. There is synchronicity between her message of trusting what children bring and the message you have been focusing on of trusting what teaching professionals and communities can bring.
Diane and Deb will go down in education history for having conducted the most civilized, fascinating, transformative dialogue in print EVER.
Am I the only one who has a problem with the penultimate paragraph in the review by Meier? (It’s not on this page; you have to read the full review at the link provided,)
I would have hoped that it would be left to Diane’s detractors to pick at scabs (including the impact of poverty on international test scores and discounting whatever might be right about our “highly regarded school districts”), not someone who is a supporter. Personally, I’m very disappointed by this review.
Ah, the review I’ve been waiting for perhaps more so than Diane’s book, itself. What would Deborah Meier say?
Well, Meier comes through. She even shocks, telling us that:
“I asked my colleague on the NBPTS, AFT leader Al Shanker, why he had signed on [to Reagan’s ‘A Nation at Risk’]. He said it was a good strategy because only in a crisis is the nation willing to put the money into schooling needed to make it really first-rate. He said—as I recall (paraphrased), ‘It’s true our schools are not as bad as the report suggests, but we are entering a new period and they either have to change dramatically or what the report accuses them of will become true. We need a smarter citizenry.’”
How now can one think the highly valued purpose AFT’s Al Shanker envisioned for charter schools is unassociated with the mess we have today?
Someone should write a book about that, how liberals got rolled on “school reform.”
They got nothing in this deal. The public schools they profess to love have been completely screwed on every measure.
Conservatives and libertarians couldn’t have played them better if they had set out to do it, but of course maybe they did.
My 5th grader attends an economically diverse rural public school. Yesterday he started test prep at home. He’s given drills online. 15 minutes in math drills every night.
Low income kids in this town don’t have internet access at home, and there are 11 aging computers at the public library. Reformers just gave my kid a huge leg up on test scores. I told him not to be too impressed with his own (eventual) score. I told him the state and federal government put him on third base based on his family income and will then tell him he hit a home run.
I bet the online test prep company got paid, though, so it’s a win/win.
Greetings Diane,
I have not written to you before, although I have followed your work and blog for some time. What a warrior you are! After reading Deborah Meier’s review of a *Reign of Error*, I decided the time was right, if not overdue. I’ve ordered the book, but haven’t read it yet, but used *The Death & Life of the Great American School System* for my book chapter on educational policy in our edited book: *Handbook of Prosocial Education* – Rowman & Littlefield 2012 (https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442211216). With 24 chapters and 30 case studies mostly written by teachers and principals, we try to get to the heart of the core of public education to…
prepare citizens with the minds, hearts and character to sustain our democracy into the future.
I am semi-retired developmental psychologist, a fellow at the Center for Applied Psychology at Rutgers U. & founder of the Center for Social and Character Development there, and have worked with and learned from schools for more than 40 years, including an 18 year stint in the NJ Department of Education where I was responsible for student support services. I also created the NJ Alliance for Social, Emotional and Character Development, a network of about 200 educators devoted to improving school culture and climate, and serve as a senior consultant for the National School Climate Center in NYC (www.schoolclimate.org).
While your blog readers would unfortunately not find our *Handbook *easily accessible or affordable, I wanted to bring it to your attention as a rich reference resource. I am working with the publisher to try to find a way to make some of the material more easily available and affordable now that it has been in print for almost a year and libraries have bought the hard copy.
Also, you and your readers might be interested in a just published free white paper by two of my colleagues on the Core Content Standards. While they do not share some of your (and my) reservations about the standards, they do make a very strong point that any standards cannot be implemented well without equal attention to the vessel in which they dwell — the culture of the school. Here is the link to “*Integrating Common Core and Character Education: Why It Is Essential and How It Can Be Done *by Kristin Fink, M.A. and Karen Geller, Ed.D. if you wish to share it (Karen is the principal of an outstanding suburban Philadelphia middle school).
http://www.character.org/more-resources/character-education-partnership-white-papers/
I know you are extremely busy now with your new book out and your appearances, but look forward at some time in the future to further dialogue with you. I have been a fan every since I saw you at AERA in New Orleans a couple years ago.
With deepest respect,
Phil Brown
Dear Dr. Brown:
I claim that the evidence that the public schools have failed over the last 20 years is that younger voters turned so massively in favor of President Obama, electing him not just once, but twice. I wonder what your response to that claim would be.