The Pastors for Texas Children, great friends of public schools, invited me to come to Texas in April 2020. I was going to speak in Houston, Dallas, and Austin to activists for public schools. The events were organized by Charles Foster Johnson, the remarkable, wise, and tireless leader of PTC. He has launched similar groups in other states, including Oklahoma and Tennessee.
Then came COVID and my trip was scratched and replaced with a Zoom meeting in late October. I had a spirited conversation with Evan Smith of the Texas Tribune, a superb interviewer who had read my book Slaying Goliath carefully and asked incisive questions. This is the recording of the Zoom. I come in about minute 15 and the conversation is about 40 minutes.
I prepared for the day by studying up on what’s happening in my native state. Texas right now is ground zero for the hungry charter industry. The state commissioner, Mike Marath, who is not an educator, is gung-ho for more charters.
The public schools, which enroll more than five million students, have been underfunded since at least 2011, when the legislature cut the schools’ budget by more than $5 billion. That funding was never fully restored even though enrollment increased. The majority of the state’s public school students and Hispanic and African American. The majority of the legislators are white men.
Meanwhile, the rightwingers have been pushing for charters and vouchers. The Pastors for Texas Children and other civic groups repeatedly stopped the voucher bill by building a coalition of urban Democrats and rural Republicans. For now, vouchers are dead.
So, the privatizers have thrown their firepower into expanding charters. Betsy DeVos gave the state more than $200 million to open new charters. Texas is overrun with corporate chains. The public schools of Texas outperform charters by test scores. Public school students are better prepared for college than charter students. Charter graduates have lower earnings after they finish their schooling. Why, I wondered, do wealthy Texans continue to fund failure?
I hope you will take the time to watch.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
Thank you for flagging that, Diane. I enjoyed it enough to not regret missing the opening half of my Seahawks game with Buffalo. Evan Smith is an excellent interviewer Any thought I have regarding public education, I can’t begin to complete without reading your last two books.
Oh, Lord. Someone send this to Biden.
Outstanding, Diane.
Does anyone else make as much sense on education topics? Is anyone this articulate on his or her feet? Wow.
It was wonderful to see an interviewer that had done his homework and asked relevant and important questions. Likewise, it was great to see an interviewee that had tons of information at her fingertips from her many years of scholarship and writing.
I am very concerned about education in Texas as it is where my grandson goes to school. My daughter and her family just moved to El Paso county, but not El Paso City. I know El Paso is on the privatization hit list.
It was an interesting discussion on merit pay which never works in education. One of the comments to the podcast were made by a daughter of a career teacher stated that with merit pay “the impact of merit pay was twofold: 1. Teachers worked to get the best prospective students, e.g. higher socio-economic families, stable families, 2. teachers stopped sharing their best ideas and team teaching, which hurt beginning teachers since they had no mentor.” Teachers do their best work in a collaborative, supportive environment, not a competitive one.
Anything about the need to open up schools?
I was pro opening up schools too but our schools are open and that isn’t the end of it. The rate of infection is rising dramatically here. We have students and staff infected. There are a lot of hard decisions that have to be made, and then made again as the situation changes.
“Opening up schools” isn’t easy. It’s just a new set of problems. I still think it’s probably better than keeping schools closed but it’s complicated and it’s not a single decision. We’ve had two rural systems here open and then close again.
Students and staff will get infected in areas with high community spread, no doubt. It may not be the end of it, but it needs to be the top priority, for anyone concerned about education. It’s not easy, but it’s impossible if it’s not a priority.
“A Biden administration is set to play a different role than Trump officials have, by pushing for additional resources for public schools and efforts to make up learning loss, while making no demands of schools on Twitter.”
I so hope we’re going to get a different approach on public schools out of DC now.
It would be such a shame if Biden followed Bush, Obama and Trump and hired the same set of ed reform echo chamber members out of the same set of lobbying groups and think tanks.
Please, please cast a wider net. Try to find someone who actually values public schools and intends to do some productive, positive work on their behalf. They will not survive another administration jammed with ed reformers especially now, weakened as they are by the complete lack of assistance on covid.
It’s now or never. If we don’t get new thinking and leadership on public schools we’re not going to have public schools anymore. Twenty years of anti-public school people in charge is enough.
Honestly maybe public schools would be better off if Biden chose someone from higher ed- I would suggest someone who has run a strong community college system.
If we have an opportunity to break with the Bush/Trump/Obama playbook on education maybe we should grab it and look in a whole different direction.