Jesse Hagopian and I Speak in Seattle

February 15, 2020 //

When I spoke at Town Hall in Seattle, I was introduced by Garfield High School teacher Jesse Garfield. Jess is one of the heroes in SLAYING GOLIATH. Here is the conversation..

Categories Education Reform

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Yossarian says:

February 15, 2020 at 2:08 pm

Question for you Diane: Many education commentators, whether linked to this blog in one of your posts or elsewhere, have said the Ed Reform movement is dead. Do you believe that? As a teacher who has immersed himself in this issue and has been on the frontlines of the war over public education, I do not. And this is why: There is simply way too damn much money at stake for major corporate players and elites to take from everyday people, over half a trillion dollars of potential profit. What do you think?

By the way, I purchased your book but it’s on a reading waiting list behind JD Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” and Tara Westover’s “Educated” which some of us are reading for professional development courses through our district’s teacher center.

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- Linda says:
  
  February 15, 2020 at 2:52 pm
  
  Reposition Diane’s book ahead of Hillbilly Elegy. Her book is by far more significant than his.
  
  Frederick Hess wrote that we are, in 2020, a decade removed from “distrust, polarization and conspiracy theories.” So, no you can’t believe what comes out of the mouths of reform’s commenters.
  They want to believe, colonialism’s benevolent patriarchy has buy-in.
  
  Reply
- dianeravitch says:
  
  February 15, 2020 at 4:26 pm
  
  Yossarian, I did not say that billionaire Ed Reform is dead. I wrote that it is brain dead, peddling failed ideas. As long as it keeps doling out money, there will
  Be willing hands to take it.
  
  Reply
  - Yossarian says:
    
    February 15, 2020 at 6:14 pm
    
    Oh, my apologies Diane, didn’t mean to suggest or insinuate the commentary came from you specifically. I’ve seen commentary from mainstream sources over the last year or so as well as links from here that led me to other articles and such. That notwithstanding, yes, I hear you there: as long as there’s billions to give to get billions more back, yes, I’d say it’s still alive and well. Most likely, the big players for Ed Reform are regrouping and, using language to bend reality if not outright fake it, trying to rebrand it for a future sortie or wave to commence at some not too distant future. Ugh. We’ll be ready. Thanks for taking the time to answer my question.
  - dianeravitch says:
    
    February 15, 2020 at 7:54 pm
    
    Not to worry. I never wrote that Goliath was dead. I did write that everything the deformers tried has failed and they need fresh thinking.
  - ciedie aech says:
    
    February 16, 2020 at 1:23 pm
    
    sadly, a huge chasm between “dead” and “brain dead.”
Linda says:

February 15, 2020 at 2:45 pm

Frederick Hess’ writing is always good for a laugh and, his review of Slaying Goliath doesn’t disappoint. Hess, the man who wrote that reformers wanted to “blow up the ed schools” and then, with his colleague, a manager of a Gates-funded ed organization, advised instead, using cash as incentive (“Don’t Surrender the Academy”, Philanthropy Roundtable) digs deep to pose a question. “Why have two decades of reform disappointed?” (or, as the reality-based describe it, “seriously harmed”)
The parts of the working brains of AEI’s staff that would provide answers have been sent off for scrap. (The place to start for solutions is income inequality… much preferable to profit taking off of kids and villainthropic dilettantes finding ways to occupy their idle time and money.)
Hess wrote that 2020 is a time far removed from “distrust, polarization and conspiracy theories”. Uh huh. At AEI, wishing for buy-in to colonialism’s benevolent patriarchy, makes it so.
There’s one point about which I can agree with Hess. He suggests more info. about the ed solutions for 2020. Since AEI’s benefactors are rich, I assume he means the wealthy’s pet projects like vouchers (theocracy). Slaying Goliath mentions a Hess co-author, Max Eden (the Koch-linked Manhattan Institute). I’d welcome a story in which the two men expand on M.I.’s glowing story about Catholic schools, we’re all “fallen” and, the Bible’s call for discipline’s rod.

Part of the fun of Hess’ writing is when he establishes his bona fides by writing he’s been a critic of big philanthropy. That self-description following his recommendation in, “Don’t Surrender the Academy”, had to have been intended to provoke reader laughter.

The best for last, Hess claims reformers are “obsessed with poverty and race”. That’s Hess pulling our leg. Gates lives in the state with the most regressive tax system in the country where the poor pay a rate up to 7 times his. Let’s merge the “obsession” to AEI’s position among the top 5 tax sheltered charities in the country. How’s that working for the 1 out of 5 children living in poverty, parents who can’t afford healthcare and unaffordable housing ?

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- Susan Lee Schwartz says:
  
  February 15, 2020 at 3:07 pm
  
  Hess is pure Orwellian.
  
  Reply
- Bob Shepherd says:
  
  February 15, 2020 at 11:24 pm
  
  Beautifully, beautifully said, Linda. I guess that to the listeners in the Neoliberal Echo Chamber, Hess doesn’t sound like the stand-up comedian that he sounds like to what you have called, above, the “reality based.” Again, well said!
  
  Reply
Susan Lee Schwartz says:

February 15, 2020 at 3:02 pm

It is up at OEN https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/No-public-school-left-be-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Diane-Ravitch_Education-Funding_Education-Laws_Education-Testing-200215-833.html#comment756341
with my Comment where I copied from the review below.
The Life And Death Of The Terrible Education Reform Movement |Gary Rubinstein’s Blog
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2020/01/16/the-life-and-death-of-the-terrible-education-reform-movement/
“This book is like a sequel not to ‘Reign Of Error’ (2013) or even ‘The Death And Life Of The Great American School System’ (2010), but instead to the first book I had ever read by her, ‘Left Back: A Century Of Failed School Reforms’ (2000). In that book, as she does in this one, Ravitch methodically weaves her way through the people and events that shaped the conflicts of education policy. She is a master of brevity and I, as a pretty verbose blogger, marvel at how she can tell the story of such complex issues like the opt-out movement or the Massachusetts charter school ballot issue in just a few pages each. It’s like watching one of those artists who with a few simple seeming strokes of a pencil captures the essence of her subject. It looks so easy though of course it isn’t.
Watch as she summarizes twenty years of education reform in three paragraphs (!) on the third page of the book.”

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Bob Shepherd says:

February 15, 2020 at 11:33 pm

Thank you, Diane, for your comments in this piece about the importance of rebuilding the union movement in the United States. SOOOOOOOOOO important! And a lesson that teachers have been teaching other workers. More of that!!!

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RT says:

February 16, 2020 at 7:37 am

I was listening to your interview with Jesse H this morning in the cool early Sunday when the warm winter we are having gave me time to stay inside and not go out to get firewood. All the house is asleep and the occasional hum of the central heat lets me know that it is still winter. But outside the toothwort leaves are pushing their green harbinger of warmer weather out from under the brown mat of wet, dying leaves.

Yesterday we joined a family we love to celebrate their daughter’s birthday at the bowling alley. We go to church with them and their daughter, in her thirties, is ever lodged in a mentality that makes her childlike. She met us at the bowling alley and ran exulting from the door, throwing herself at my daughter like a kid would do. Inside we got to bowl beside a group that contained a young man who was the great slayer of bowling pins. For whole stretches of time, he mowed down the pins like I did that one time during the afternoon. When we complimented him, he began to talk to us enough to show that he was special needs himself. He said he was on the high school bowling team. I bet they won a lot.

When I got to the quote from MLK in your conversation I suddenly had t quit listening and think of these two experiences. You and Jesse were talking about the standardized testing and its definition of some children as automatically inferior. I had just witnessed two wonderful children who would forever be children. They were unscathed by the disruptions of the past two decades. They were insulated by the love of their families and by their inability to perceive themselves as fundamentally lesser than their peers. But it made me think of the thousands of children who felt as if there was no point in trying because they had always been told what Jesse related in his introduction: that he was made to feel that he had nothing to offer.

Slaying Goliath made me think that it was spring in the United States. Like the toothwort leaves that are pushing up through the winter mulch, we are coming back to the idea that people are worth something. All of them. Great civilizations draw from the people their individual abilities to produce good things. In a few weeks, the toothwort will coat the forest floor with a beautiful white bloom that marks each spring here. All up and down the Appalachians, trillium and violet will herald the coming of yet another cycle of life. The people will live on.

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- Bob Shepherd says:
  
  February 16, 2020 at 8:36 am
  
  Beautifully said, Roy!
  
  Reply
- dianeravitch says:
  
  February 16, 2020 at 9:32 am
  
  Roy,
  Thank you. Beautifully written. I was moved.
  
  Reply