Pedro Noguera has an excellent book review in the New York Times Book Review of Vicki Abeles’ new book “Beyond Measure.”
Vicki is the California mom who created the film “Race to Nowhere” about the pressures of high-stakes testing and how they were ruining children’s lives. She traveled all over the country, showing her film in community centers, churches, wherever she could find an audience.
Her new book shows how the “reforms” of the past generation have crushed students’ appetite for learning. Noguera praises it highly and says it will upset the education establishment. He says it is a subversive book that has the potential to upset the current creativity-killing reforms that are popular in Washington and state capitols, but not in schools.
The only error in his review is his reference to America’s alleged “slippage” on international tests. As I have demonstrated time and again, our students have never been no. 1 or no. 2 on international tests; typically, we have scored in the bottom quartile or at the median, not at the top. We have not slipped. This has been the case for fifty years. The low scores of the poorest students drag down our average. And besides, the international tests don’t predict anything anyway.
Nonetheless, it is a terrific review of an important book.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Great book, lots of food for thought. However, Abeles’ film of the same is like a big ad for the featured charter school. The group I screened it with found it hard to stomach. We were really confused how Abeles could allow the film to focus on such different topics from the book. It was a huge disappointment.
Oh, and the main charter school featured in the film, High Tech High, has its own graduate school of education. Which is supported by the Walton Foundation and other familiar foundations. See for yourself below:
http://gse.hightechhigh.org/ourSupporters.php
Read the book, skip the film.
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Appreciate the detective work, Danielle.
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Is High Tech High featured in Beyond Measure? I haven’t seen it yet, but I did see Most Likely to Succeed and that charter was the centerpiece. I am not in favor of charters, but went to the screening with an open mind. There was a panel discussion afterward. Our MA secretary of Ed, James Peyser, who is extremely pro-charter (and involved with Families for Excellent schools), immediately tried to make it about how great charters are. One of the men behind this project, Ted Dintersmith, basically said this is about student-centered innovation, not about charter, public or private schools and with the right support this can happen in a variety of settings. He went on to eloborate that he’d been in many charter schools, some good and some so bad he called them “evil”. That shut the secretary up for the moment!
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Our district hired a consultant to lead a community plan for new schools. He basically did a sales pitch for High Tech High. I resented the hard sell, particularly because he kept circling back to it even though very few local people expressed any interest in the model.
I felt like we were paying a salesperson for a particular model of schools and I wasn’t the only one. The sales pitch damaged his credibility, so much so that he was basically useless after the first day of meetings. People just didn’t trust him because he was so clearly promoting these schools.
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Mamaji: thank you for passing along a recap of Ted Dintersmith’s comments re schools.
😎
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High Tech High is a brief mention in the book, but the star of the film.
The film does an extremely lengthy and shallow examination of some of the decent ideas of this charter school. There is no mention of how the humanities are incorporated into the student work. It is very superficial and makes it seem like this school has the answer to all that ails education.
I really loved Race to Nowhere, so this was a dissapointment. This film is pure PR for charters, especially High Tech High.
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Kindly excuse typos above – rushing around today!
It should read:
Great book, lots of food for thought. However, Abeles’ film of the same name is like a big ad for the featured charter school. The group I screened it with found it hard to stomach. We were really confused how Abeles could allow the film to focus on such different topics from the book. It was a huge disappointment.
Oh, and the main charter school featured in the film, High Tech High, has its own graduate school of education. It is supported by the Walton Foundation and other familiar foundations. See for yourself below:
http://gse.hightechhigh.org/ourSupporters.php
Read the book, skip the film.
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I once planned to write a book about capitalism titled Beyond the Dreams of Avarice but then I realized there is no such place.
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TAGO 😃
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