Please watch this two-minute video of John Kuhn, Texas Superintendent, who tells the story of two adjacent school districts, one rich, one poor. He explains with eloquence and passion why schools should be equitably funded and how unjust it is to fund schools differently and expect to get the same results.
This video is part of a series of short videos produced by Michael Elliott for the Network for Public Education.
Please watch it, tweet it, share it on your Facebook page, and wherever else you reach your friends and acquaintances. Send it to everyone you know.
Kuhn is powerful and eloquent on behalf of children, communities, public schools, justice, and equity.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Damn, that’s good. Sending right now.
Shared accountability. I love it.
Excellent.
Nothing extraneous to the main point.
“Educational malpractice doesn’t happen in the classroom. The greatest educational malpractice in the United States happens in the statehouse, not the schoolhouse
AGREE, Ohio Algebra II Teacher. Right on.
It is the elected representatives that allow unfair funding formulas to be applied to public education making poor areas more vulnerable to privatization. The system of test and punish targets poor minority communities. Rather than treat poor families equitably, representatives are enabling corporations to commodify the young people born into poverty who, in many cases, are also minorities. Poverty is never a consideration in standardized testing, but it is significant in school funding. Funding schools through property taxes is inherently unfair and unequal. Privatization is another application of separate and unequal for poor minority students. While Kuhn is not presenting anything we didn’t know, he is able to explain the institutionalized inequities clearly and succinctly.
TARGETING is the right word. Nothing done accidentally although the appearance of pushing equity is always made the public mantra.
I am sorry to ask you this this way. In your 2000 book, *Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, you say: *
“He [Mortimer Adler] jumped into the fray on Hutchins’s behalf, but with ill effect. Adler convinced other educators that he and Hutchins were trying to impose authoritarian values—if not derived from Aristotle, then from Thomas Aquinas. The pugnacious Adler happily fed the fury of progressives by describing himself as a “Thomist”, even though he was not Catholic. He seemed to relish insulting his audience, as he did when he first arrived at the University of Chicago *and told a gathering of eminent social scientists that their methods were flawed*.” [p. 304]
I have tried to find out why Dr. Adler said that they were flawed. Do you know why and can you tell me?
I have my own reasons for believing that they are flawed. I just wanted to know if he agreed with me.
Eric L. Schiltz
Round Rock, TX
On Sat, Dec 9, 2017 at 9:01 AM, Diane Ravitch’s blog wrote:
> dianeravitch posted: “Please watch this two-minute video of John Kuhn, > Texas Superintendent, who tells the story of two adjacent school districts, > one rich, one poor. He explains with eloquence and passion why schools > should be equitably funded and how unjust it is to fund sch” >
Read the source. The book is amply footnoted. I wrote that 20 years ago!
I didn’t see any SHARE buttons for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, et al. Not easy to share without them. Exclusive videos that are not easy to share usually don’t get shared.
Lloyd I just tweeted the video at you. It’s embedded in twitter. If you go to my shoot4education FB page or NPE’s page you’ll find it available there. John is doing really well today. It’s not an exclusive video by any means. The only reason i make them is to get them out into the world. Not sure why there were no share buttons but vimeo is odd that way. You can copy the url or click the little paper airplane in the frame. For some reason they like to use share icons no one recognizes. Vimeo is great for releasing videos because you can update them without losing the link. No other platform lets you do that. This is a long explanation to say…. I sent it to you!! 🙂
Thank you. I found it and shared it on my Facebook page.
Lloyd, there is a generic way of sharing anything on the web: copy its address from the addressbar. The addressbar is what you see on this picture in the upper left, shaded in blue. This works every time, without the need for any share button.
Thank you, and I often embed links in my posts or comments. Does this work for a video so the video appears instead of the link making it easier for someone to click and watch without the extra step?
Thanks,Diane. This is really effective I put it on my Fb page. Mary Rivkin
Sent from my iPhone
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We’re now entering an era where it’s going to be even harder (i.e. impossible) to find the state revenue to make school funding fairer without reducing state spending on more affluent districts. That would make affluent districts even more reliant on local and property taxes to fund their schools. A lot of residents of those districts are already under serious financial stress from the combined state and local tax burdens they bear, and that burden is increasing now with the elimination of SALT. If I’m one of those residents, when I hear calls for “fair funding,” I’ll smile with everyone else in public, but I’ll keep one hand on my wallet.
He’s a FORCE! I heard him speak at the march in the summer of 2011 in DC! Sure wish he were our nation’s education secretary – TRULY.
the power of video
Thank you Diane and Michael for making these videos that reach so many with the truth.
Yes!