TrustED, a new education “news hub,” listed me as one of its 20 “thought leaders” (a term I have never liked) for 2017. I am grateful for the recognition. However, I mistakenly confused TrustED with Education Trust, a Gates-funded organization known for its devout support for high-stakes testing and its belief that standards and tests are the best path to racial equality. We have been on that past for nearly two decades without any reduction in inequality.
I am not familiar witfh TrustED. I got a comment on my new Facebook page from Todd Kominiak, the managing editor, pointing out that TrustED is not EdTrust. So there. My apologies. I am reposting to clear up the mixup. I have learned over many years that the best way to deal with a mistake is to own it and correct it.
The post called me the “most overtly political” person on the list.
That is true.
Let me explain.
If you don’t like bad policies, you have to become political.
If you want change, you have to become political.
If you don’t like decisions made by the U.S. Department of Education or your state legislature, you have to be political.
If you don’t like the idea of turning Title 1 and special education funding into a honey pot for vouchers, charters, and home schooling, you must be political.
If your governor and legislature want to privatize education and destroy the teaching profession, you must be political.
If you want to protect children, teachers, and public schools from profiteering predators, you must be political.
I confess.
I am overtly political.
It is a strange role for a scholar and a historian. I am supposed to observe.
But when you observe malfeasance, fraud, lies, propaganda, corruption, and error, you can’t stand by as a detached observer. You just can’t.
You have to get political, get up, act, raise your voice, fight for what you believe in.
That’s why I am political.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane Well-said; and a mandate for the coming year(s). CBK
I find myself in agreement. The maxim in law is “Quietat es consenteri” -Silence gives consent. People who voluntarily drop out of the political process, and do not become involved, are giving their consent.
I wish you well.
You can either do politics or you can have politics done to you. Thank you for choosing to do politics. The more the better.
Any supporter of public education must be political today. Public educators didn’t ask for any of this attention. It is challenging enough to be a public school teacher today without having to defend your chosen profession. For many years teachers labored long and hard without any attention whatsoever. Now that education has been commodified, everyone is an “expert” with a money generating scheme, and “thinking tanks” actively dream up schemes to get their paws on public dollars, and none of it is evidence based.
I appreciate this statement! Thanks! My wife is a naturalized American citizen, (born in Russia, Soviet Union). I have been trying to get her to become more involved in the politics of her adopted nation. Maybe this statement, can give her the “spur”!
Putting John King on the list for promoting equity is a joke. Testing never restored equity to anyone. For anyone that is an authentic supporter of social justice and equity, read Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig’s Cloaking Inequity instead. https://cloakinginequity.com/
Agree. The EdTrust is posturing as if trustworthy and politically neutral, thereby “qualified” to name who is the most political among those who have influence–so-called thought leaders. Diane has a reputation for scholarship and activism on behalf or public education that does not require affirmation from EdTrust.
For some reason I am reminded of the pervasive use of rating schemes in and beyond the United States and publicity for these.
One of these, to be rolled out in China in 2020, is a single national Social Credit rating for every citizen that will include judgments about character. Imagine a US version with a Social Capital rating for every person so that all, including our nation’s children, are routinely viewed as assets or liabilities. How close are we to a version of the following?
In China, a Social Credit rating for each person will be a single score. The score will be derived from a data base that compiles information from multiple sources.
Your Social Credit rating, and the information on which it is based, will determine whether you deserve to receive specific social benefits or should not. The benefits may include faster internet service, expedited travel clearances, eligibility for a loan, preferential treatment in getting a job interview.
The scope of information-gathering in this scheme is not surprising, given the data archives generated from routine record-keeping (e.g., traffic stops, late payment of taxes), extensive government surveillance of political dissidents in China, and the rapid uptake of social media and consolidations of data by owners/operators of major internet platforms.One of these is Alibaba, like Amazon, for online shopping, its branch, Sesame Credit for loans, and current partners of this corporate conglomerate. Among these are Baihe, China’s biggest matchmaking/rating service, and Didi Kuaidi, a taxi service with ratings about the credit-worthiness of users.
Alibaba is one of eight data-rich companies participating a government pilot program with some hope of receiving a permanent government license to issue official credit scores, starting in 2020. That is a hope. The government may take good ideas from the pilot and take on the job of rating each person (with some exemptions carved out for high officials).
In the meantime, Sesame Credit is rating the social value of individuals based on their transactions with Alibaba and its partners. These ratings include judgments about the lifestyles and character traits of persons who purchase online products and services.
In a widely circulated interview (Caixin, a Chinese magazine, February, 2015), Li Yingyun, Sesame’s technology director said: “Someone who plays video games for 10 hours a day, for example, would be considered an idle person, and someone who frequently buys diapers would be considered as probably a parent, who on balance is more likely to have a sense of responsibility.”
Current Sesame Scores range from 350 to 950. The scores indicate the creditworthiness on the individual, their reputation as trustworthy and upright citizens. The score is based of five factors and their weightings vary for each individual:
1. Credit History: past payment history and indebtedness for credit cards, other bill payments (on time or not).
2. Behavior and Preference: inferences about the social value of the websites a person uses, and their online behavior, product categories they shop and quantities of their purchases.
3. Fulfillment Capacity. record of account balances, use of financial products and services, meeting contractual obligations including leases, taxes, fines.
4. Personal Characteristics. accuracy in the amount, level of detail and avoidance of discrepancies in records that include personal information such as home address, length of time of residence, mobile phone numbers, internet addresses.
5. Interpersonal Relationships: ratings based on judgments about the online interactions and characteristics of a person’s online friends
China is justifying the Social Credit rating as the best way to end rampant corruption, restore and reward virtue, and thereby increase the economic competitiveness of the nation.
I wonder what justification EdTrust offers for building a list that is conspicuous in burying its definition of a “thought leader.”
At least they did not include Betsy DeVos, perhaps the best judgment of all.
How frightening and Orwellian! Based on what you describe, the elderly and sick would watch their social capital evaporate. Would this imply that government and private institutions could ignore large segments of the population? It sounds like social engineering to me.
Here’s the link: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion
dienne77 Thanks for getting one of the links, one of many on this project.
Many, yes, but Wired UK broke the story and all the information floating around comes from their article.
If you are ‘overt’, that makes others…?
John,
Inert.
Gassy.
Undert.
I find it fascinating that the folks at EdTrust seem to think that discussions about education should be “apolitical”. That’s a dangerously naive, and probably disingenuous approach, especially from a group known for playing a passive aggressive game of political karate in nearly everything they write.
Everything about education is political. And pretending it’s not is also a political action. It’s time for EdTrust, and everyone else for that matter, to grow up and acknowledge the inherently political nature of education. The time for innocence is over.
EdTrust played an aggressive and decisive role in organizing civil rights groups to insist that annual testing remain in the ESSA federal law, because being tested allegedly is a Civil right.
They are funded by Gates, among others.
They are funded by Gates, among others, who also funds advocacy for charters that violate Civil rights and Brown V Board as, in the words of the NAACP, ” concerns have been raised within the African American community about the quality, accessibility and accountability of some charters, as well as their broader effects on the funding and management of school districts that serve most students of color.”
Interesting and quirky list from Ed Trust… mentions Lily but not Randi. Wonder why?
Confessing is good, as doing so invites reflection. My confession…
https://files.acrobat.com/a/preview/8eb2a51d-333c-407c-8305-52747272eeb0
As if the school reformers aren’t overtly political. Betsy DeVos for example, the whole billionaire boys’ and girls’ clubs, Broad, Gates, the Kochs, the Waltons, etc., ad nauseam.
I agree. The whole idea that some people are above icky, dirty “politics” is silly. If you’re an advocate for certain policy ideas then you’re inevitably “political”. It’s nonsense too, inevitably these people who declare themselves immune to politics are actively lobbying.
“Bipartisan” doesn’t equal “good”. It never has. There were and are plenty of dumb ideas that were and are promoted by “both sides”. In a way “bipartisan” is more dangerous than “partisan” because one gets the kind of lockstep agreement I see in ed reform. Dissent is important.
Thank You! I’m fairly new to reading your blogs. I applaud your necessary willingness to stand up and be heard. Most citizens do not understand the complexities of providing good educational programs to students. And I’m certainly no expert in that area.
As a retired public school Treasurer/CFO I’m appalled at the lack of accountability and integrity found in managing public funds that flow to charter/community schools. What a shame that the parents of those charter schools don’t scream as loud as those of the public schools, and rightfully so, when it comes to transparency of those parents tax dollars.
A lot of times the discomfort with “politics” seems antidemocratic to me. I saw it with Common Core. Ed reformers were angry parents were weighing in- Arne Duncan treated the dissenting parents with absolute contempt. Whether they’re right or wrong surely they have SOME room to object to what’s placed in a PUBLIC school?
It’s always like “these members of the the public are getting in our way again” and the patronizing tone! “Well, all these people in Chicago are objecting to school closings because they’re ‘traditionalists” or “sentimental”. Good God. NO effort to listen to them.
DeVos does it now. Her assumption is we’re all “afraid” – we fear her awesome “disruption”. There’s never the slightest recognition that we may reject her crackpot ideas because they’re bad ideas. It’s perfectly reasonable to reject the disaster she caused in Michigan but she insists on making it about “emotions” or something.
Well stated. If parents want stability for their children and refuse to accept a permanent state of experimentation with “crackpot” ideas, they are portrayed as resistant to change along with professional teachers. With so many billionaires buying the allegiance of our so called representatives, democracy is at risk.
But when you observe malfeasance, fraud, lies, propaganda, corruption, and error, you can’t stand by as a detached observer. You just can’t.
You have to get political, get up, act, raise your voice, fight for what you believe in.
AMEN and AMEN
YES! I love that you take a stand and ARE POLITICAL! That’s why I follow you and have learned so much about what it takes to make a positive difference (especially to students.)
It is so easy these days to use labels to stereotype.
Political? Of course EDUCATION IS A POLITICAL ISSUE. It was the first thing eliminated when the GOP ‘deficit hawks. began its ‘austerity’ attacks on the states… which was before their GRAND THEFT of this tax bill.
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/06/05/trump-devos-demolition-of-american-education/%20Detroit:%20The%20Broken%20Promise%20of%20School%20Privatization
Everyday, your site offers the voices from across the almost SIXTEEN THOUSAND SCHOOL SYSTEMS that demonstrate the speed of the destruction because of the politics.
https://www.alternet.org/education/new-national-map-shows-how-k-12-education-privateers-are-almost-every-state
For goodness sakes, you were Ass’t Secretary of Education , and you stood up to Bush, and told him how his LCLB was a travesty…and the books you wrote were NOT about POLITICS but about OBSERVABLE REALITY aka TRUTH!
POLITICAL? OF COURSE.. in the true meaning of “political reform’.
Here — in ” Commonweal Magazine’s” essay—is a discussion about ‘the politics of education’ in today’s world, and your book “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools “How Not to Fix Our Public Schools” https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/reform-reform
BELOW IS A SMALL SECTION, with selected quotes FROM THIS MAJOR ARTICLE THAT GETS IT RIGHT ABOUT DIANE RAVITCH:
“The most clear-headed and influential critic of privatization is Diane Ravitch, who has earned a reputation as an independent thinker. Refusing to embrace the formulas of left and right, she attacks politically correct speech codes as intelligently as she criticizes the free-market faith in competition. She has also been willing to change her mind in public: at one time an advocate of standardized testing, she is now a skeptic. And this skepticism animates her broader critique in “Reign of Error” :– a book that dispels the clouds of reform rhetoric to reveal the destructiveness of the privatization agenda.”
“In reasserting the claims of public education, Ravitch is swimming against a strong current of conventional wisdom.:
“Much of Reign of Error is devoted to setting up reformers’ myths and then knocking them down with statistical and historical evidence….”
Business buzzwords, never precise to begin with, can become a blunt, destructive instrument in hands of education reformers. “Creative disruption,” for example, may or may not be an appropriate entrepreneurial strategy, but it is an altogether inappropriate approach to education, which proceeds (especially in the early years) by slow, deliberate increments.”
As RAVITCH OBSERVES: ‘Creative disruption’ is certainly disruptive, but it is not creative. It is not what children and adolescents need. It sacrifices social and human values that are more important to children and to society than consumerism, competition, and choice.” What those values may be is a matter of democratic debate. But we can be sure they include efforts to sustain community, encourage informed citizenship, and nurture zest for inquiry—THE COMMITMENTS THAT RAVITCH’S OWN CAREER EMBODIES. WE ARE IN HER DEBT for reminding us that they still matter.
“Privatization is a bipartisan cause, though the word itself is rarely mentioned. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind program and Obama’s Race to the Top, along with most of the mainstream media, have embraced the corporate reformers’ worldview in all its bullet-point banality. This view depends on a series of assertions, from general assumptions to specific recommendations. Here are the key points:
*Education at all levels is about training students how to succeed in a globalized economy; declining test scores and graduation rates demonstrate that schools are failing our children;
*poverty is just an excuse for failing schools, and great teachers by themselves can counteract its effects;
* teachers unions protect mediocre teachers through outdated policies like tenure; standardized tests (sold by various companies in the education-industrial complex) should be used to evaluate teachers as well as students, and teachers whose students’ scores fail to rise should be fired;
*a nationwide network of privately run (but publicly funded) charter schools should be encouraged as an alternative to public schools. This last is another arena of consumer choice for beleaguered parents oppressed by the “public-school monopoly.”
“What could be more American than that?”
“In education as in other areas of American life, privatization constitutes a powerful agenda, supported by billions of private (and increasingly public) dollars. RAVITCH CHALLENGE IT AT EVETRY POINT.
She begins by reminding us of what the corporate reformers don’t talk about: the catastrophic impact of budget cuts, child poverty, racial segregation, bloated budgets for testing, increased class size, scripted curricula, teachers’ loss of professional autonomy, the absence of special-needs children and nonnative English speakers from charter schools, and the diversion of public funds to pay dividends to charter-school investors. As in health care and the prison system, what is called privatization is really a euphemism for crony capitalism—plutocrats supping at the public trough. “
“But RAVITCH KNOWS that in order to take on the privatizers, argument alone is not enough. She first has to challenge them on their own ground: numbers. So she starts out with a necessary but narrow case. She refutes the privatizers’ first premise, that statistics show schools in decline, by citing a no-stakes federal test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress—the kind of test you can’t prepare for and one that involves neither punishment nor reward for your performance….”
“To be sure, statistics can sometimes confirm the consequences of long-term economic trends. RAVITCH OBSERVES that the racial achievement gap has narrowed since the 1970s, while the income achievement gap has widened. This is hardly a surprising outcome, given the rising economic inequality of the past several decades, but it is useful in calling attention to what goes on outside the classroom—an area largely ignored by reformers”
“RAVITCH IS ON HER firmest ground when she begins to push beyond the numbers. Addressing the performance of U.S. students on international tests, an obsessive concern of reformers, Ravitch at first notes that our scores have been improving, and that in tests that measure independent thinking (one wonders how), the home team blows everybody else off the charts. According to the education critic Keith Baker, whom Ravitch quotes, the best traditions in American education involve “ambition, inquisitiveness, independence, and perhaps most important, the absence of a fixation on testing and test scores.” So why copy the “rote systems” of China and Japan—especially when there is simply no association between test scores and the economic success of a nation? Nor is there any relation between college-graduation rates and national economic health”
“RAVITCH TAKES DEAD AIM at the reformers’ mindless chant of “college for all”—which exaggerates the cash value of a college degree while reducing its personal meaning to a mere meal ticket…”
“This is the future according to Bill Gates, himself a college dropout, and the other billionaires backing school reform, the technocratic fantasy that powers the “college for all” creed. The reformers’ belief that “our economy will suffer unless we have the highest college graduation rate in the world.” RAVITCH CONCLUDES, THIS is simply not borne out by any available evidence.
“By challenging the reformers’ economistic case for college, RAVITCH RAISES REAL QUESTIONS about the utilitarian assumptions underlying the reform agenda. Policymakers have oversold the economic benefits of a college education “and lost sight of the value of education for personal, civic, aesthetic, and social purposes.” Mild words, but Ravitch’s understatement makes a better case for the humanities—at all levels—than many windier books have done. There are, she writes, “other ways of thinking about higher education” than the market-utilitarian way.
ACCORDING TO RAVITCH, reformers simply do not understand teachers because they cannot imagine anyone doing anything without a financial incentive. So they constantly try to promote merit-pay schemes, overlooking abundant historical evidence that merit pay neither motivates teachers nor improves student performance. Reformers’ “belief in the magical power of money is unbounded,” RAVITCH WRITES “Their belief in the importance of evidence is not.” So it doesn’t matter to them that there is no evidence that schools improve when tenure and seniority are abolished. Unionized teachers are no bar to high student achievement (as in New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut) or to low achievement (as in the District of Columbia and other high-poverty urban districts). The lowest achievement is in the South, where there are no unions. As for tenure, it is simply due process applied to questions of firing, and is rooted in the necessity of protecting academic freedom in the classroom. “WITHOUT TENURE” RAVITCH WRITES, “teachers would be subject to firing for assigning Huckleberry Finn or Harry Potter. Abolishing it is a prescription for banality.”
WAY TO GO DIANE!
I hope your Asia trip offers is a great relief from the ‘politics here.
Thank you for being political because it helps my mental state! Although I have closely followed politics since my college years, I am too consumed with it lately. But I tell people that this is not really politics as I see it, it is life or death of a democracy. This is not about small differences, this is about major decisions that are destructive to our society ( and life forms) as we know it. When I was teaching, I had my 5th graders present a news panel every Friday. I cannot imagine how I would be able to keep my opinions of our current government to myself! Keep up the good fight. We need all the strong voices before it is too late.
In this case, like Herodotus, the historian is an important historical figure.
I’m a fan of your political voice. And, I’m thankful for you speaking your political truth after having freeing yourself from your mental and emotional commitment to the standards movement when nobody was questioning standards movement as the basis for educational reform.
Unfortunately, Ed Trust and Ed Trust West education reformers are stuck in the mental straight jacket of the standards movement with standard test scores as the be all of education reform being the core of their existence.
indiscriminate data collection is devil’s opiate that draws a shadow across the minds of too many well intended education reformers. In the Kennedy/Johnson Vietnam War presidencies, with Robert McNamara’s “body count”, this not benign metric of that lost war contributed to what McNamara called in his book on Vietnam the “fog” of that war.
Supporters of NCLB reform employing high stakes standardized test scores should have been reminded of the Vietnam War over-reliance on the body count merit as driving force behind government policy. Both government policies of body count and student test scores uplifted a single metric as a primary focus and both frames were a failure.
Yet, Ed Trust and Ed Trust West have not let NCLB and the mass failure of government standardized testings lessen its lobbying to make students test scores as the basis for reforming American education system.
“. . . when nobody was questioning standards movement as the basis for educational reform.”
There were a lot of us who questioned, challenged, fought against the standards and measurement malpractices. I first heard the term “data driven decision making” in the late 90s and fought the inherent falsehoods and fallacies of that regime since. Some of us paid a dear price personally, professionally, monetarily, etc. . . for doing so.
Although many agreed with my analysis almost all were too afraid to say a thing (especially after seeing how those of us who did challenge things were treated).
There are a number of posters here who have similar experiences.
So yes, there were people all along who questioned the standards movement, to declare otherwise is to distort the real history of many individuals who have been fighting this shit from way before Diane, thankfully and thanks to Deb Meier, changed her mind.
Thank you, Diane, for your steady and inspirational political activism! I feel grateful for your influence and your posts….May 2018 be a year during which positive, democratic, and compassionate actions continue to grow.
I thank God every day for you and your politics. If it wasn’t for you, I might still be depressed, and thinking I was alone trying to fight the administrators of my school and district. But, because you are here (doing this blog), I learned I was not alone. There are others who think like me! Thank you for being who you are—political and much more.
Second that!
Yes, we need to be political!
Perhaps the need to be political should be a part of teacher education. Yes, you have to fight for what you believe in and you have to recognize when your rights are being violated. Knowing and understanding your teaching contract is a crucial step but don’t assume that your union leaders know it or know how to support teachers when the administration knows how to bully its way through their agenda. I thought that my union would be the support system I needed but unfortunately, I was wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I have understood the importance of unions my whole life and can certainly see how many people fighting in unison can help protect our rights. Unfortunately I have become one of the many public education teachers that were pushed out of a district where I had worked for 22 years. But, when you have local union presidents going along with all of the demands of the administration without question, it’s a huge problem. When you have a state union president saying that they have no jurisdiction over the local unions to act in the best interest of its members, they may be accurate but when there is no acknowledgment that taking some responsibility would be advantageous, it’s is extremely discouraging.
Nonetheless, we need to continue to be political and we need to fight for what we believe in.
You will be interested in this, if you haven’t already seen it: ========== http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454675/progressive- school-discipline-reform-hurting-students-parents
Virus-free. http://www.avg.com
On 28 December 2017 at 17:00, Diane Ravitch’s blog wrote:
> dianeravitch posted: “Education Trust listed me as one of its 20 “thought > leaders” (a term I have never liked) for 2017. I am grateful for the > recognition, especially since I do not always agree with its policies, > especially with their devout support for high-stakes Testing. ” >
Please keep being political!
Please read the article from Saint Louis, Missouri. How ironic: now the charter industry cries that their schools shouldn’t be judged by students’ test scores, when low test scores in inner-city public schools were the very reason for the charter’s being granted the power to take money from those same inner-city public schools.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/can-missouri-s-charter-schools-be-measured-by-a-single/article_23746905-4e08-563d-9b64-c5571176b460.html
We all Thank you for your decision to get political and bringing us along for the ride.
Fully agree. Thanks for your devotion to the cause.
Don’t forget that your president rode on a platform of not being part of the “political machine”. He made that part of his appeal, and is continuing to try and make the word “political” a pejorative one to throw at his enemies. Ed Trust is obviously using the word in that sense.
In South America, they try to get the same effect by labelling people like you “subversive” – a word that, unfortunately, carries very strong, unpleasant historical connotations, but I doubt that Trump and his cronies will have the same success.
Just as the LGBTI community reclaimed the word “queer”, maybe it’s time for progressives to reclaim the word “political”!
Congrats! Well deserved!!!
Diane,
I am laughing my head off at this post, and all I can say is that you are a dynamo, and may you remain nothing but erudite and political! More power to you . . .
Lois Gibbs, who was a non-political housewife, was roused to action by harm to her child by Love Canal. I always remember that she once said that she got nowhere with her protest until she went public and political. Politics is another word for responsibility in a democratic system.
We should ALL be thayt way, even when times are good, William. Great comment you made!
Fortunately I read this later, knowing TrustED had nothing to do with Ed Trust, so I didn’t feel negative going in. True, they water themselves down– do themselves a disservice– with the occasional disclaimers about politics (sounds like phrases added by an editor trying to sell the group as ‘agnostic’). However, it was refreshing to see a recommended ‘thinkers’ list dominated by public ed professionals/ proponents. The [unconscionable] inclusion of John King made me mad. But the inclusion of my hometown’s supt of schools– where my sis is asst hs principal — was a thrill!
In fact, democracy depends on citizens who are “overtly political” (with a small “p”). Thanks Diane for the reminder of why political activity is just as important as ever.