Mark Funkhouser, the director of the Governing Institute in Washington, D.C. and former mayor of Kansas City, wrote a terrific article recognizing how social media–specifically, this blog–is changing the national conversation about education.
While Funkhouser focuses on the debate about Common Core, he acknowledges that the underlying issue goes to the heart of our democracy. Blogging and social media have given parents and teachers a means of speaking back to the powerful.
This blog in particular has created a means by which those who lack vast resources of money and political power can be heard, and just as important, can find allies.
He mentions the role of the blog in supporting the Badass Teachers Association, as well as the Network for Public Education.
What he sees is that I have relied on my readers to inform me and each other as we struggle to protect our children from excessive testing and our public schools from privatization. Together, we are powerful. We are redefining democracy to allow many more voices to be heard, not just those who own the media.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There is nothing better than “truth to power.” As more of the public becomes aware of what is happening in and to public education, the better off our children and grandchildren will be. As a retired teacher and mother of a daughter, son and daughter-in-law who are teachers I feel their pain. This site and your drive Diane to change things is such a positive. As more voices join yours, I think our desires to preserve public education will happen at the ballot box.
The success of this blog is particularly impressive given how frequently its author forgets to provide a link to the article she’s describing. 😉
Tom:
Nice one!!
Tom Hoffman, my all-too-frequent omission of the link is evidence of authenticity (and age!). That is what happens when you don’t have staff. My staff is my readers, who quickly catch my errors.
Diane:
We do not see eye to eye on many things, but congratulations on maintaining a fine forum for discussion, discovery and debate.
“. . . those who lack vast resources of money and political power can be heard,”
That’d be me lacking those vast resources. And this site, muchas gracias to Diane, gives me a voice/forum that I could never have dreamed of ever obtaining.
So, thanks not only to Diane but the many contributors and of course the readers, more of whom we’d like to hear from!
Duane, sometimes I think this is your blog. Now about Wilson…
TAGO!
To one of my favorite posters and the owner of this blog—
When can an individual do?
“Even the smallest dog can lift its leg on the highest building.” [Jim Hightower]
But can an individual make a difference?
“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” [Mark Twain]
But why break the educational establishment’s consensus now?
“If you don’t speak out now when it matters, when would it matter for you to speak out?” [Jim Hightower]
Isn’t standing out risky?
“The middle of the road is for yellow lines and dead armadillos.” [Jim Hightower]
Why not GoAlongtoGetAlong? [aka GAGA]
“The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.” [Jim Hightower]
So with all apologies to dead fish and armadillos, keep breaking the silence, keep blogging, keep posting.
You’re making a difference.
Thank you very much/muchísimas gracias/domo arigatoo gozaimasu.
😎
As usual KTA, TAGO!
So necessary. I’m amazed at how little parents in Ohio public schools know about the Common Core. I’m not an educator, and it’s a little disconcerting to watch this narrow conversation between heads of foundations and state and federal politicians, with virtually no public information or discussion.
This is an ordinary rural public school district in Ohio, working and middle class, there are probably many like it in this state.
They’re radically re-working our schools and no one knows that it’s even planned, let alone what’s planned.
I had this (inadvertently) hilarious conversation with parents a few weeks ago. We were trying to determine if a local Christian school had converted to a charter school. We think it has, but there’s no way to find out without going there and asking whoever is running the place. You can call anything a “public school” in Ohio, and anyone can open one. We don’t know who runs them, there’s no public reporting that is accessible for people here, and we’re all paying for them.
It’s remarkable.
Chiara, I share that nonplussed feeling. I am an educator in a small way(enrichment classes for preschool). I became aware of the radical changes happening around me when my anchor client (an employee daycare) acquired a new director in 2010: suddenly curriculum & schedule changed in a way that caused me to lose most of my students, while I was simultaneously being asked to ‘align’ my tiny program to ‘state standards’ (which had abruptly changed under a Rep gov’r).
My own kids were already out of the local public schools, & I had failed to note the subsequent proliferation of standardized tests. I did some research, got up to date, & found this excellent blog.
What really floors me, as a local taxpayer/ parent in a district vastly different from yours (wealthy NE suburb with an incursion of “1%-ers”): a community of engaged parents– who only recently were decrying changes in the local school system’s reading list– seems entirely oblivious to these issues: (a)annual stdzd tests K-12 have increased from 5 to 13 in the last 5 yrs (due to adding full NCLB rollout to state’s own h.s.-grad-reqt circa 2006, combined w/gov’r’s recent adoption of CCSS)– & (b)as of 2013-14 new total roughly 21 assessments K-12 (due to gov’r’s adoption of high-stakes teacher evaluation)– all of which cuts about 2.5 mos [25%] from time to teach what was in my kids’ day an excellent curriculum derived from state core standards in place since early ’90’s (now replaced by CCSS– by fiat– by gov’r). These changes seem to have happened too swiftly for parents to have grasped; local media is clueless.
Meanwhile in 20-min-away Newark, I read that my gov & his apptd ed-reform commish have worked w/Mayor Booker & benefactor Mark Zuckerberg to break ground on a TFAdorm-commercial-charter ‘campus’ to replace ‘failed’ closed schools.
Obviously local control of p.s. in my state is a myth, whether in traditionally wealthy hi-performing districts or in inner-city districts. How did this happen so quickly? Or has it been happening incrementally for yrs, completely unnoted by we who pay very high taxes for what many still seem to think is the fairly-good NJ public-school system?
If we were writing a novel on this topic, everyone would call it a fantasy. This whole scenario doesn’t seem, even remotely, a possibility in a sane world.
I agree! In fact, when I research a topic on education, I do so in the search toolbar of your blog site. You have become my google. 🙂
TN Mom: I added the link: http://www.governing.com/gov-institute/funkhouser/col-diane-ravitch-rebellion-common-core-state-standards-education.html
Wow! What an endorsement. You deserve it, though. You have given us all a place to share, complain, debate, learn, laugh and cry. I can’t thank you enough. You are my hero.
This is amazing too:
“Mayor Rahm Emanuel keeps telling us that Chicago’s school system is too broke to adequately fund the schools it already has, but that hasn’t stopped him from gearing up to open as many as 21 new charter schools in the next two years.
The mayor likes to say that he’s all about improving the choices available to parents. But before he hands the charters another nickel of our tax dollars, allow me to make a humble suggestion: How about making them disclose how they spend the money we give them, so that parents and other citizens can make even better choices?
This suggestion comes to mind thanks to the ongoing litigation pitting Dan Mihalopoulos, ace investigative reporter for the Sun-Times, versus the United Neighborhood Organization, a charter school empire with 16 schools.
Folks, this is a championship bout. Mihalopoulos’s determination to force UNO to reveal how it’s spent tens of millions of public dollars is matched only by UNO’s determination to keep that information secret.”
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/charter-schools-spending-foia-united-neighborhood-organization/Content?oid=11880450&utm_content=buffer5fbce&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer
So, the only way to get information on a “public school” is for a private entity to sue them, and then the school can simply refuse to release the information.
Where are the ed reformers on this? Do they support UNO in their quest to stop the public from finding out where the money goes? We know some of it went to David Axelrod, for a “spin” campaign. How much did that take out of classrooms? Who else got paid? UNO has a huge debt burden, and the public are on the hook for every penny. Why are they paying top dollar political consultants?
Diane, Thank you for giving us a voice.
Not the “change” we were looking for…a local board of ed president in my town once said many years ago, “you voted for me, you stuck with me”. Americans voted twice for the people who are directing the insane “changes” in education. Stop blaming the corporate world and recognize that our government leaders are responsible for what is happening to our schools, our children, and our teachers.
I agree with you only in the sense that it is our elected officials who have steadily removed legal safeguards [over a period of 30+yrs], encouraging influx of influence-peddling corporate dollars at every level of state & fed govt, thus priming not only our schools, but every other type of gov’t-run ‘public good’ to move toward privatization. This is not just about Obama. As a neoliberal, he has simply followed the path paved by Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, & Bush Jr.
Obama has definitely been given bad advice about education. Too bad Diane Ravitch isn’t still in D.C. – she’d set him straight.
From the referenced article:
[Ravitch] “sometimes debating advocates of the reform paradigm such as former Washington, D.C., schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee.”
My response to it:
Well, they were supposed to debate next February but Rhee (whom I refer to as the Rheeject) first demanded that they each have two fellow debaters. She then reneged saying she couldn’t get a second person to help her. Ravitch would chew Rhee up and spit her out. As it is it appears that Rhee (or perhaps her handlers and moneymen) realized that they and their arguments would have been blown out of the water.
Playing the devil’s advocate – we can’t blame Rhee for not wanting to appear foolish. If I were her, I’d avoid Diane also.
Duane Swacker & Ellen T Klock: spot on.
Michelle Rhee is literally a star in the firmament of self-styled “education reform.” So is David Coleman. What could, or should, these demigods of creative disruption possibly have to fear in a public demonstration given their superhuman intellects and profound knowledge and experience? Yet in an apparently rare moment of realistic [not rheealistic] self-appraisal they have both realized—undoubtedly with the help of their handlers and financial backers, as suggested—that there’s nothing to be gained and everything to be lost by engaging in a public and fairly moderated discussion with mere mortals like Diane Ravitch and Pasi Sahlberg and Helen Gym and others.
As for the intellectual heft, moral stature and sheer grit that Michelle Rhee would bring to a serious discussion of education issues with Diane Ravitch, I am reminded of this prescient description by Mark Twain of the Queen of Masking Tape:
“She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.”
What Michelle Rhee has to do with parrots, I am not sure, although I am even less sure what she has to do with genuine teaching and learning either. But strangely, the description seems to fit…
In any case, how on earth could Twain have known of her so long ago? Could the rumors of Rocky and Bullwinkle and the Wayback Machine be true?
Inquiring minds want…on the other hand, save it for the Common Core bubble-in.
😎
For a thousand years in which Europe was plunged into banditry and illiteracy, a small group of monks on the island of Skellig Michael, on the cold northern Atlantic, copied books and kept humane learning alive. This blog is like that. And Diane Ravitch is the learned abbot of that outpost, that refuge from the barbarism of education deform.