Mercedes Schneider is a high school teacher in Louisiana. She has been blogging since 2013 about the state and federal government’s determined efforts to force bad ideas on teachers like her. Too often, she writes, she has had to share bad news. But when she read SLAYING GOLIATH, she understood that she was part of a national movement to resist bad policies.
She writes:
It has been an uphill battle, and I know that my words, though informative, are also often overwhelming and disheartening for those who care about the community school and who seek an encouraging word.
I have had fellow supporters of American public education tell me they appreciate my work but wish I had some good news to share.
Well, then. Today is that day.
Education historian, Diane Ravitch, has published a book, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools.
It is a book about parents, teachers, students, administrators, and other public school advocates across the nation whose grass roots efforts to engage in the fight save America’s schools have created a movement, a book that allows public school advocates the opportunity to step back and see a more complete picture of their combined efforts across cities, states, situations, and years.
It is a book about us.
As I turned the pages and read of so many advocates contributing individual moments of advocacy– writing, speaking, organizing, protesting, striking, lobbying, voting, running for office– I felt wonderfully encouraged to realize on a deeper level that I am not one of few but one of many contributing to a remarkable, undeniable, and powerful effort to combat an ed-reform effort chiefly fueled by a handful of billionaires.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes. We are many. Yes.
Inspiring piece by Mercedes Schneider on an inspiring work by Diane Ravitch.
“It would be easy to fill another book with realistic proposals that could be funded by philanthropists who wanted to do good.” I look forward to such a book by Mercedes or Diane or another of the many in the Resistance!
I don’t believe they should be funded by so called “philanthropists.”
It doesn’t matter how “Noble” individual “philanthropists” might be.
Their money corrupts whatever it touches.
We need to TAX these people at much higher rates so that they have no more control over how the money is spent than you of I have over how our tax dollars are spent.
Perhaps the most important part of Bernie Sanders campaign is that he is not funded by billionaires which means he is not beholden to the few.
Exactly.
Number One on Diane’s list of suggestions for “philanthropists”, as quoted by Schneider: “They could pay their share of taxes to support well-resourced public schools.”
Bethree,
Read the book!!!
Bethree,
My previous book had a long list of prescriptions for what billionaires and the federal government should do instead of pinning their dreams on standardized tests and privatization.
yes: and reformers have NO excuse for ignoring the detailed work done by dedicated writers
How fortunate public schools are to have Diane Ravitch working to help. The Deformers have money but together, we teachers, educators, parents and former teachers have the power brought by truth.
Gad, I get tired of the wealthy who know ‘everything’. /s
It’s very interesting to read the reviews of Slaying Goliath. They are falling into two categories. On the one hand, there are reviews by brilliant, ethical folk like Mercedes Schneider or David Berliner and Gene Glass, which are glowing. On the other hand, there are reviews by those in the employ of Deformer/Distrupter organizations. The latter don’t mention any facts or arguments presented in Diane’s book. Rather, they describe the book vaguely as “vituperative” or “imperious.” In other words, they object to her tone.
Evidently,
when billions of taxpayer dollars are siphoned off from public schools into private profits for the owners and golfing buddies and mistresses and ne’er-do-well cousins of charter school managers;
when other billions of taxpayer dollars are diverted, via vouchers, to private schools that teach children to hate LGBTQX persons, to be intolerant toward immigrants and foreigners, and to believe that Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs;
when an entire generation of students has humane education in the arts, literature, history, and science stolen from it in the name of test prep;
when millions of teachers’ lives have become quotidian hells of micromanagement by clueless, officious numerologist data mongers, even as those teachers have to take second and third jobs to earn a living wage;
when a computer mogul can foist puerile, backward “standards” on the entire country, with no vetting by teachers or scholars or researchers and no mechanism for revision of them, so that he can have a single bullet list to key depersonalized education software and Orwellian stack-ranking databases to;
when curricula and pedagogy in ELA and math are dramatically trivialized and distorted and devolved by sham testing and puerile “standards” and essential parts of the curriculum are simply eliminated;
when companies divert billions of taxpayer dollars into profits on shoddy, invalid, tests that don’t measure what they purport to measure;
when a few oligarchs pour billions into systematically undermining democratic institutions, privatizing American education, and killing off teachers’ unions and due process for teachers; and
when millions of teachers and parents and children are profoundly harmed,
the proper response is supposed to be, “But, gee, while the motives and policies of Reformers are admirable, there are a few ways in which those policies be tweaked to make them EVEN BETTER!”
It’s these negative reviews, Diane, that show that the book is working, that you’ve landed your shot square on the nose of the giant. Look at the work of any great muckraker from our country’s past, and such reactions were also to be found from the toadying, sycophantic, paid minions of those whom the muckraker exposed. Those reviews are Goliath bellowing.
Good comment!!!
Well stated! The corporate scammers will never want to hear the truth or see the evidence right in front of their eyes. After all, there’s money to be made destroying the nation’s democratic public schools.
Bob,
The only bad review I have seen thus far (there will be more) was in the New York Times by a writer named Annie Murphy Paul. The reformers called it a “scathing” review. The main thing she said was that I should have given “both sides,” explaining why so many black parents prefer charter schools. She linked to the article by Eliza Shapiro and Erica Green that I criticized, the one that referred to a Walton-funded protest and that claimed “hundreds of thousands” of students on charter waiting lists, based on a 5-year-old press release from a charter lobbying group.
See my post here about the Times’ article on which Ms.Paul relies: https://dianeravitch.net/2019/11/29/robert-kuttner-and-i-challenge-the-new-york-times-slant-on-charter-schools/
I do not agree that it was my obligation to tell “both sides.” The book has a point of view. I documented everything I wrote. No one criticizes reformers-disrupters who fail to tell “both sides.”
Oh, and of course, the usual suspects, funded by Walton, Bloomberg, Broad, etc., are active on Twitter, slamming me for being white, old, female, a union shill, etc.
You should consider of the “slams” a red for ed badge of courage.
indeed!
When Zephrius eek, with his sweete breathe….
Repitition of When always makes me think of Chaucer
Whan that Coleman speketh, with his courteis breth,
Then joie in lerninge doth dye a certayn deth.
LOL, RT. So funny.
Diane took the words out of my mouth & confirmed it, Bob: only negative review I’ve read was in last week’s NYT. The reviewer seemed to agree on the gist of the book, but, determined to make it a negative review, inflated 2 points of disagreement & threw some rotten tomatoes.
As Diane notes, the reviewer’s swipe re: “black parents want charter schools” goofed in its reference [personally, my take was, it was a polemic knee-jerk meme]. Her remark that Diane was simply “wrong” on the value of natl stds was a laughable, & believe it or not parenthetical dismissal of a complex question, revealing naïveté. Her theme that Diane has lost her edge/ nuance was “supported” by broad-brush disingenuous gloss entirely without nuance, which reduced it in my eyes to ad hominem level.
We have had Common Core national standards for 10 years with zero results
Congrats on a strong movement. Now it’s time for the next chapter.
Dear Distrupters:
If you don’t like Diane’s tone in Slaying Goliath, try this on instead:
Thou art to a person, artless, craven, dissembling, miscreant rougish, venomed, villainous, beef-witted, fallow-fallen, earth-vexing, puttocks and louts. Methink’st thou art a general offense and every man should beat thee, you starveling, you eel-skin, you dried neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stock-fish—O for breath to utter what is like thee!—you tailor’s-yard, you sheath, you bow-case, you vile standing tuck!
oops! cx: Disrupters, ofc
You left one out that is very apt: you Bill’s pizzle
You Arne-witted, Betsy-skinned dried Rhee’s tongue
And the most insulting of all: You vile standing Marshall Tuck!
ROFLMAO!!!!!
You Arne-witted, Betsy-skinned, dried Rhee’s tongue
Oh. My. Lord. That’s wonderful.
Lord. SomeDAM. ROFLMAO!!!!!
Too busy at the moment to think of a good Shakespearean rejoinder, but so thoroughly enjoyed.
No! No! Not the vile standing tuck!
Muzzle that thing! LOL!
“Philanthropies should respect the sound principle of giving to meet needs instead of giving to impose their ideas and take control of others. …
Now that the blush of deform is off the rose, the public can see the nightmare of late stage reform. It is the portfolio model that hinges on a rigged system enabling the hostile takeover of entire school system on based flimsy grounds. To fight this battle we need much more than just us. We need communities to demand democracy. We need social justice organizations to defend our public schools. We need politicians that stand for justice and cannot be bought. We need the courts to defend the rights our of young people, teachers and communities. We need the many to confront the wealth and political capital of the villainthropists.
I don’t know why it copied this way: cx, “No genuine social movement is created and sustained by elites.”
This article is very encouraging. 70% of people under 30 years of age do NOT like Trump and what he stands for!! They see the wrongs that persist in this country.
……………….
How Millennial Leaders Will Change America
BY CHARLOTTE ALTER
JANUARY 23, 2020
Love ’em or hate ’em, this much is true: one day soon, millennials will rule America.
This is neither wish nor warning but fact, rooted in the physics of time and the biology of human cells. Millennials–born between 1981 and 1996–are already the largest living generation and the largest age group in the workforce. They outnumber Gen X (born 1965–1980) and will soon outnumber baby boomers(born 1946–1964) among American voters. Their startups have revolutionized the economy, their tastes have shifted the culture, and their enormous appetite for social media has transformed human interaction. American politics is the next arena ripe for disruption.
When it occurs, it may feel like a revolution, in part because this generation has different political views than those in power now. Millennials are more racially diverse, more tuned in to the power of networks and systems and more socially progressive than either Gen X or baby boomers on nearly every available metric. They tend to favor government-run health care, student debt relief, marijuana legalization and criminal-justice reform, and they demand urgent government action on climate change. The millennial wave is coming: the only questions are when and how fast it will arrive…
https://time.com/5770140/millennials-change-american-politics/?utm_source=emailshare&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email-share-article&utm_content=20200127
Let’s hope young people care enough about the future to show up in great numbers to vote in 2020. We need every vote to make significant change.
A blue tidal wave needed!
I have been researching the underpinnings of the Great Recession lately. The wording of your post brought immediately to mind the economic imbalances and loosened oversight giving rise to hostile takeovers and huge increase in the shadow banking sector. Our public education woes are parallel and of a piece with it. All of ed-deform is driven by gluttonous titans– created by economic imbalance– blindly wielding their bloated cash reserves to vacuum up revenue streams unprotected by democratic governance.
re: retired teacher, 1/27 10:49am.
Thanks yet again Dr. Ravitch. We are so very fortunate to have you and that you are willing to “into the breach againl again dear friends”.
As long as we have people like you there is hope.
The chapter on Massachusetts almost made me late for school. I keep reading something and my hand moves to the bottom of the screen to post my response, only to discover that it is a strange thing, a book.
Ain’t it the truth? It’s like me swiping the car dashboard to “rewind” part of a radio show. With books, I’m reduced to dog-earing the page or even highlighting & penciling margin comments! (But shudder to do it in a brand-new hardcover)
I am reading the book–is it possible that it’s even better than The Death & Life…–?–it’s tremendous!! So glad Todd Farley was included: hope people run out & buy his book, as well. So important to note that, w/regard to “standardized” testing, NOTHING has changed since 2009. This is why, in addition to all the teachers in the streets in 2018, EVERYONE, EVERYONE: teachers, parents, students need to TAKE TO THE STREETS & REFUSE TO TAKE ANY MORE TESTS. THIS YEAR…NOW!!!
“Stop your whining & start your winning!”–from a very wise 7th Grader.