Vicki Cobb is an award-winning author of more than 90 children’s books, mostly about science.
In this post, she reviews SLAYING GOLIATH.
The review begins like this:
For the past 25 years there has been a national war between so-called education reformers and public schools. Education historian and indefatigable blogger on the topic, Diane Ravitch, has been chronicling the attacks, losses and now, finally, victories through her blog, where she posts up to ten times a day, every day, since April of 2012. In her new book Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools, she pulls the disparate threads together and writes a brilliant, page-turner story of this war against public schools for a period that included my 5 grandchildren.
Who are the bad guys? Millionaires and billionaires who come from a business background where forces of free-market choices, competition, and new standards create disruption in the market place allowing the best products to rise to the surface. Ravitch names names. We know who they are and they include Bill Gates, Betsy De Vos, and the Walton (Wallmart) families.
Ravitch aptly changes their names from education “Reformers” to education “Disrupters.” Measurement is key to determining educational success in the form of high stakes testing that occurs every school year for grades k-12. Right out of the starting gate the Disrupters’ premise was wrong-headed and untested.
The methods of this warfare included slamming public schools as “failing” and demonizing teachers while supporting the creation of brand-new charter schools and vouchers to pay religious schools using tax payer money and selling the concept that now parents have “choice.” If you knew what it takes to create and sustain a good school, you would know that non-educators with dough are not the people who should be starting one no matter how pure their motives. (I served 18 months on the board of a charter school that is now shuttered.) Politicians from presidents, G.W. Bush and Barack Obama, to local school board members jumped onto the shiny new Disrupter bandwagons. It never occurred to them that America’s children were Guinea pigs. Disruption is not healthy for children. Using children to experiment with the profit-motive in education is an insane idea.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I thought this was interesting:
https://nbc24.com/news/local/public-school-advocates-gather-at-forum-to-talk-school-vouchers
“Public school advocates gather at forum to talk school vouchers”
It’s Ohio where ed reformers just did a huge expansion of vouchers, and in the process designated thousands of public schools and public school students as “failing” just by changing the mandated tests and scoring scheme. They weren’t failing last year, but to expand the voucher scheme they had to designate all these kids as failing, so they massaged some numbers and made it so. The public school students are harmed by the new designation, but no one considered them- they went under the ed reform voucher bus.
“Public school advocates” are meeting to see if they can mitigate some of the damage to their students and schools.
If we have a “movement” that advocates exclusively for charter and private school students (‘the ed reform movement’), shouldn’t we also have a group who advocate for public school students? Do public school students not deserve the same kind of passionate, exclusive advocacy ed reformers lavish on the charter and private schools they prefer?
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The Ohio ed reformers also exempted the private schools from mandated testing.
So now if you want to escape the ed reform mandates they impose on every public school student in the state, you have to switch your child to a publicly funded private school. A win/win for ed reform- public school students are stuck with their lousy policy, but private school students, although (now) publicly funded, are exempt from the mandates.
Public school students lose, again. They got nothing- zip- out of this backroom deal. No one was working on their behalf in Columbus. They weren’t even considered.
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Money grants wealthy people access. Broad’s association with Yale is an example of such a “quid pro quo” partnership. Broad gets to legitimize his horrible ideas and agenda by using Yale’s elitist name, despite the fact that Yale does not have a school of education. This is yet another example of the corrupting influence of money.
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Sorry: This was intended for the Broad article.
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‘Tis all intertwined, eh!
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After ordering my copy of Diane’s book, I checked to see which public libraries in my area were purchasing the book. Some were. Others I encouraged to buy it.
If all of us make sure the book is in our libraries it will increase its visibility.
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Please write about it and give me your feedback after you read it
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I’m happy to report that all 5 of the libraries I contacted in southwest Ohio have the book on order.
I’m looking forward to cheering for the resistance with each page read and, then writing my observations.
Thanks for writing the book.
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Linda,
I look forward to hearing your reaction.
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It is long past time to get politicians out of education and return it to parents and teachers. This will never happen from the top down but it can and must happen from the classroom up. It is time to subvert the system in the best interview of children. It is time to Stop Politically Driven Education (which is the name of the book that tells you how at dot coms)
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a great slogan for the ‘new’ era of anti-reform policy: “from the classroom up”
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“For the past 25 years, there has been a national war between so-called education reformers and public schools”
Actually, it is debatable that the first shot in this war was in 1983 when President Ronald Reagon released “A Nation at Risk,” a report that was wrong, biased, misleading, and flawed.
That means this national war started about 37 years ago, not 25.
Wars have major battles and minor ones. The assault that started this was was “A Nation at Risk” followed by years of blaming public schools and public teachers and teachers’ unions for almost everything that is wrong in the United States.
For instance, the misleading and lying phrase: “The School the Prison Pipeline” that one author, link below, traced back to the results of Nixon and Reagan’s war on drugs.
That War on Drugs started by two GOP presidents is what caused the explosion in the prison population in the United States, but the public schools got the blame.
http://www.niusileadscape.org/bl/the-school-to-prison-pipeline-where-did-it-come-from-how-do-we-stop-it-by-mei-ling-malone/
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