Arthur Camins wrote a beautiful review of SLAYING GOLIATH at The Daily Kos.
In light of Camins’ experience as an educator and his passion for justice, I am most grateful for his close and sympathetic reading of this book. Until recently, he was Director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at Stevens Institute of Technology.
He writes, in this excerpt:
Ravitch’s first chapters, Disruption is Not Reform! and the Odious Status Quo, set the context for a thorough repudiation of the state of education in the United States: Endemic historic inequality made worse by decades of focused effort to disrupt a bedrock of American democracy, public education; Support for standardization linked to punishment of students, teachers, and schools by test scores; and, A determined effort to shift essential financial support from democratically governed public education to a competing private sector that includes privately governed charter schools and vouchers for private schools. The perpetrators call themselves reformers. Ravitch calls them disrupters. In her telling, that is a descriptive accusation, not a complement.
“No one likes the status quo,” she writes. “Disrupters claim to oppose the status quo, but they are the status quo. After all, they control the levers of power in federal and state governments. They write the laws and mandates. They define the status quo. They own it.” They are a somewhat disparate collective of market ideologues, self-regarding billionaires, technology titans, hedge fund managers, and entrepreneurs out to make (or steal) a fortune at the public trough. What unites them in an unwavering faith (ideas not supported by evidence) in the power of competition to drive human behavior.
Slaying Goliath upends the myths of declining achievement and the lies that teachers unions and incompetent teachers are responsible for poor children’s failure to rise to their potential (or do well on standardized tests. Instead, Ravitch centers blame where it belongs, on our systemic failure to address the systemic- and personally debilitating effects of poverty.
I hope you will open the link and read the review in its entirety.
The book’s official publication date is TODAY! January 21!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
CONGRATS!
“David and Goliath”
The Teacher and the Oligarch
The David and Goliath
The latter stumbles in the dark
While former doth defyeth
Camins’ review is a beautifully written and detailed endorsement for “Slaying Goliath.” I plan to share it with my friends on social media and urge them to read the book.
Thank you, Diane, for your research, ability to analyze and explain things so clearly, and your tireless advocacy. It helps so much having you on our side. Congratulations on the book publication!
Thank you. I look forward to reading your reaction to the book.
“Disrupters claim to oppose the status quo, but they are the status quo. ”
In fact, they are not even status quo but those who want to turn back teh wheels of education policy by over a century when education was a private matter.
Privatizers of anything are people who simply refuse to go with the times, the times which are socially and environmentally conscious.
that crucial understanding: the reformers endlessly fuss about needing to disrupt the status quo without taking any responsibility for that fact that the status quo they are still so viciously disrupting is a chaotic status quo of their own making
Yes, they want to go back to the “ruler discipline” days when the motto was “spare the rod, spoil the child”
Except they have updated the motto: spare the testing, spoil the child.