This is an interview with Russ Roberts of the Hoover Institution about SLAYING GOLIATH.
The Hoover Institution has a huge endowment, and it is committed to free markets. Its funders do not like public schools. They disparage them as “government schools.” They like vouchers and charters.
Russ is a nice guy, and he believes in choice and charter schools. We disagreed. You might enjoy this podcast.
I was a Senior Fellow at Hoover from 1999-2009. Then when I realized that testing and choice were failing and were doing damage to schools and students, I left and began a campaign to stop what I once supported. At Hoover, testing and choice are dogma, and I no longer was a true believer. Hoover is situated on the Stanford University campus but has touchy relations with the university. While I was attached to Hoover, I donated my papers to the Hoover archives, which has a fabulous collection of personal papers of all sorts of people, including educators.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
He is an economist who believes in so-called free markets and limited government. He is a poor listener who believes the propaganda from the charter industry. I listened to excerpts. He would do well as an advisor to DeVos.
Thank you, Laura. He got a lot of high fives on Twitter from other free marketeers.
Thanks for this lively discussion. Roberts is a free market disciple. While he came across as someone that believes in the value of choice, other than Success Academy he didn’t really have too many facts to back up his claims. Like so many reformers he is biased against unions and even adequately trained teachers. Worst of all, he attended a public school, yet he still claims that we have spent too much money on unsuccessful public education. If public schools have failed our nation why do we have one of the highest literacy rates in the world? Graduates of our public schools built our nation. Our “fearless leader” attended private schools. Yet, he remains misinformed, oblivious to geography and painfully biased.
Roberts was somewhat informed. Unlike you, he did not have facts and figures at his fingertips. You blinded him with science. It didn’t matter though because Robert lives in his ideological bubble. The mood of the discussion was cordial. It was like watching a mother cat play with an unsuspecting mouse.
Good observations. Of course, he thinks he is the cat. I was frustrated by his lack of knowledge and felt sure he skimmed the book.
I was disappointed that the Roberts clings to the same old hackneyed messaging the disruptors had ten years ago. A lot has happened in ten years, but the myth of Success Academy and New Orleans live on.
The Hoover institutution is aptly named.
Herbert Hoover clung to failed economic ideas during the early years of the Great Depression and the people at Hoover institute do the same.
They don’t care about facts and most of them were just too stupid to get jobs as real researchers at Universities.
They write idiotic “white papers” that are basically opinion pieces because they never learned how to do legitimate analysis.
Stupid Hoover clowns like Condoleeza Rice are the reason America gets into catastrophic wars. Rice has the brains of sea urchin.
In the leadup to the Iraq war, she was invoking visions of a mushroom cloud without having the foggiest idea about Iraq’s actual nuclear capabilities. The very definition of a clueless twit.
And the worst part is that despite their long string of abject failures, they still have the ear of Presidents and get their idiotic opinions repeated in the NY Times and Washington Post.
I must respectfully take you to task and disagree. Having listened to half of this (I couldn’t any more than that), he is not “committed to free markets” any more than DeBos or any others like the Kochs, Jobs, Arnold or whatever, those who claim to be. They are committed to favored markets. The one thing they fear most are real free markets in which all the players have access to unfettered, unbiased information.
I was going to listen to this podcast while I walked on the treadmill, but after reading the comments, I was afraid that I would end up throwing something at my computer!
Or just…throwing up…