Laura H. Chapman was a devoted supporter of public education, the Network for Public Education, and this blog. I was honored to post her carefully researched and well documented comments on this blog. Although her health clearly was in decline, she faithfully attended every annual meeting of NPE.
Laura was a distinguished arts educator. Please read her obituary in The Cincinnati Enquirer. We have lost a treasured friend.
Laura shared my dislike of billionaire reformers who didn’t know much about education but imagined they could solve its problems with Big Data. She was opposed to privatization of public funds. She opposed the substitution of technology for real teachers. She was a fierce and eloquent supporter of a rounded liberal arts education. she never failed to inspire me with her wisdom.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So very sorry to learn of her passing.
My heartfelt condolences to her family, friends, and all of the people whose lives she has touched over the years. She will be missed.
LikeLike
Really sad to hear.
LikeLike
I am so sorry to hear of her passing. Laura ALWAYS connected the dots for us, giving us invaluable information. She will truly be missed.
My heartfelt condolences to her family and friends.
LikeLike
Honored is the right word. Dr. Chapman was sagacious. I will always hold a place of deep respect for her in my memory.
LikeLike
Yes. Exactly. Me, too.
LikeLike
This is so sad. My condolences. I always enjoyed and learned from her comments on this blog.
LikeLike
Oh Diane,
I’m so sorry. What a huge loss for humanity. Her brilliance always played out on your blog. She will be missed.
LikeLike
So very sorry.
She made a positive difference and will be missed. Laura’s life mattered. 🌻
LikeLike
Yes. It did.
LikeLike
Oh no!!!!!!!
Laura was brilliant and intrepid.Someone you wanted on your side.
What a loss!!!!!!
LikeLike
I didn’t know her until I read her obituary above. No doubt she’s a highly respected scholar and educator. It’s a huge loss for humanity and wisdom. My condolences.
I just found one of her important articles about the impact of NCLB on art education. I will read it.
LikeLike
Bless Laura, I will make a donation in her memory.
LikeLike
Laura was simply a cut above most mortals. Compassionate, breathtakingly smart, a careful and caring thinker and champion of substantive education dealing with the best that humans have created. One will look long and long for her like. What awful news,.
LikeLike
When Laura took on the likes of Gates and Coleman, how puny they looked beside her. Intellectually, she TOWERED over them.
She was a warrior for kids and teachers and public schools.
LikeLike
Laura Chapman was a good version of the Eye of Sauron. .
When she fixed her gaze on the billionaires, there was no hiding.
The Eye of Chapman
The billionaires could run
But never could they hide
Successes had they none
She Laura evil spied
LikeLiked by 1 person
Good version of Eye of Sauron.
LikeLike
The Eye of Chapman
The billionaires could run
But never could they hide
Successes had they none
When Laura evil spied
LikeLiked by 1 person
Such sad news. I will miss her insight and dogged analysis. It was a real pleasure meeting her at the NPE meeting in Indianapolis. Wish I could have spent more time with her.
LikeLike
My condolences to her friends and family.
LikeLike
Very sad.
LikeLike
I am so sorry to hear this. I did not know of her other impressive accomplishments until I read the article in the link, but I admired her informative posts on here. My condolences to all who knew her. And a sad loss for public education as well.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Laura communicated regularly with public ed activists in Ohio to encourage our work. She was an incredible researcher and public education advocate who wasn’t afraid to speak and write the truth. RIP, Dr. Chapman.
LikeLike
I’ll miss seeing Laura on this blog, well, reading her razor sharp commentary and analysis.
Actually, except for Diane, of course, and a few headshots here or there, I have no clue how old or what people on this website look like.
I thought Laura was 30-something -or thereabouts…
Maybe that’s because her perspective, her ideas, her mind always seemed so much sharper than mine? She was in the fast lane intellectually and I feel like I’m plodding along doing 25.
Her writing (and this entire blog) are a true gift in that sense.
A departure each day from the dominance that image and video play in my life, no matter what I try to do about it.
Words continue to matter. Facts matter.
My condolences to Dr. Chapman’s family.
LikeLike
Nicely observed and written. You pointed out a truth that had eluded me. In terms of her intellectual vigor and curiosity, somewhere between 25-30 seems about right. A paradigm shift taking place in certain diseases right now is substituting age with fitness levels to be eligible for some treatments. For example, there are people in their 70s who are much more fit and able to withstand treatments that an out of shape 40 year old can’t. Your comment about her youth and vigor coming through in her writing is so accurate. She was as intellectually fit and vibrant as anyone, any age. Every word she wrote proved it.
LikeLike
Probably part of it is me, GregB….muy perspective. But I think that’s a good point you make about the paradigm shift. I hang out with people who are older than me -true “Baby Boomers” (I’m at the tail end of that generation) and beyond. And oftentimes these friends and family members outpace me when we’re out hiking, for example. Fitness levels AND an overall willingness to embrace life in all its wild complications seems to be so important. Intellectual curiosity is a key part of that mix, I think.
LikeLike
Laura was 86, but her brain was at the height of vigor and lucidity.
LikeLike
She is greatly missed. She is a beautiful person who always spoke things that we needed to hear.
I never thought about this happening…and that includes everyone who is a regular commenter on Diane’s blog.
LikeLiked by 1 person
nicely said: we take all of these great voices for granted, knowing how much we depend upon them
LikeLike
Very sad. She was a true devotee of public education and the arts. She used her research skills to always find truth.
LikeLike
I was thrilled to meet Laura in person at one of the NPE conferences. Her astute view of the mechanisms behind the privatization regimes left us with valueable weapons in the struggle to save our public schools. My deep condolences to you, Diane, and to her family and friends.
LikeLike
I am very sad to hear this news. My last memory of Laura was meeting her for an early morning breakfast in Indianapolis. She really was a great researcher with impeccable ethics and a special friend.
LikeLike
I am sorry to hear this. Laura’s posts were amazing, full of elucidating research. I remember now that in one she made some reference that made me realize she was much older than I’d thought, but I tossed it aside, continuing to view her in my mind as a scholar of 50yo at most. It does not surprise me to learn that she was such an accomplished person. What an enormous contribution she made to the education field. RIP, Laura Chapman.
LikeLike
I cannot really add to this list of accolades. I was introduced to Dr. Chapman on this site, and soon learned that this was a person who had completed her homework. I think I commented one day that I want to be like her when I grow up.
LikeLike
I will miss her contributions to the blog. I depended on her expertise and knew I could trust her careful analysis. What a loss to all. I wish many happy memories to her family and friends.
LikeLike
So sorry to hear this. She was so smart and could see so clearly. She will be missed.
LikeLike
I was an art education student of Dr. Chapman and her life partner, Patricia Renick from 1974-78 at the University of Cincinnati. We called Patricia “Pat,” and she was vivacious, loving, and upbeat. Her nickname was “Mother Art.” Even as adults, my classmates and I had difficulty dropping the “Dr.” because we held Laura in such high esteem.
I was the first Art Education major to graduate summa cum laude from the school of Design, Architecture and Art, and I still have her letter of recommendation that described me as one of the “brightest and best.” I felt as if I had failed them both when I quit teaching after being RIFed from 2 schools in 3 years.
In 2000 when I became an art teacher again, NCLB was in full force in Ohio, and I boldly phoned her to meet and catch up on current education trends. She laughed when I told her how she struck fear in our undergraduate hearts if we showed up unprepared for her class. She was interested in hearing that two of my 8th graders filled in their scan-tron sheets to create a smiley face and a penis. When I asked what on earth they were doing, one of them said that he was only there so he could attend the dance that Friday. “I happen to know this test doesn’t affect my GPA,” he told me, pointing a finger at my face, “It affects YOU, and I don’t care about you. You can make me come to school, but you can’t make me try.” I told Laura that surely the principals and superintendents would protest the obvious flaws in forcing a school in a rural, low-income area to improve scores on such a test each year, when students’ home lives were such a struggle. The next year I was hired by a surburban elementary school to teach art to over 600 fourth graders, many of whom became physically ill on testing days because they wanted so much to do well, the opposite of the other school.
In 2012 she sent an email asking me to describe how I’m evaluated, how many students I taught, budget, schedules, etc. for a research paper. She said, “The evaluation of teachers by standardized test scores and principal observations is going in the direction that hit the teacher at Oyler (a public school in a low-income area near U.C.). In fact, more standardized tests are in the works and scheduled for administration in 2014, grades 3-12, as a condition for schools receiving federal funds from the ESEA. New state mandates are getting on the books regardless of the governor’s political affiliation. Since 2009, Bill Gates who thinks he is qualified as an expert on education, had been funding many projects that converge on more data gathering and sruveillance of teachers and the overall performance of schools.” So you can see that even as a retired professor, Laura was right on top of everything that was happening, who was doing it, and why.
I started meeting her for breakfast every month or so, to fill her in on what was new at school, and she explained the agenda behind it all, and warn me about was was coming next. I used to awaken in the wee hours with the chlling thought that it was like the plot of a bad sci fi movie, where there seemed no way to effectively fight the evil forces that had taken over. I joined BATs about a month after it began, full of hope that all we had to do was reveal what we knew was going on, and our communities (and unions) would shut it right down. I had even greater hope listening live to the first NPE convention from my home as I prepared art lessons. I remember our union presidents promising Diane to stop accepting Gates’ money, then reneging on that promise three days later.
In 2014 Laura gave a lengthy slide presentation at the Ohio Art Education convention that was titled “The Circular Reasoning Theory of School Reform: Why it is Wrong,” explaining in part why SLOs and VAM were invalid measurements of learning. It was, as you can imagine, annotated like a Master’s Thesis. Her voice was weak because was suffering from COPD and recovering from a cold, but her presentation had an enormous impact. Immeditately afterward we art teachers attended a workshop by the Ohio Dept. of Education intended to train us to write SLOs for our K-12 art students. We nearly rioted. Yet, the following school year, I had to give a test to my fourth graders the first day of school over a list of art vocabulary words I was certain they would not already know. At the end of the year, I tested them on the same 15 words, and nearly every one of 850 students passed with flying colors. Yet most were upset to see their low scores from the beginning of the year. “I can’t believe I was that stupid,” one girl said. I told her that I had to show that she learned something from me, so she was supposed to fail the test the first time. “WHY would you DO that to us?” she gasped. Now we have opted for shared attribution, where 50% of my evaluattion as an art teacher is based on 4th grade math and reading scores.
My students look forward to art class, and I have lost no enthusiasm for teaching them. This is my 20th year at my school, and every year I have something new to try, something marvelous to experience with my students. I rarely miss a single day of teaching. My way of fighting back is to absolutely refuse to let anything dampen my love for teaching art. I actually feel lucky to be an insider during these years, to see and know that even with the most misguided of mandates, my colleagues and I show up every day for the children who come through our doors.
The last time I saw Laura was in late February 2020 when it was becoming obvious that teaching in a building with 2400 fourth, fifth and sixth grade students was putting me at risk for contracting COVID, and that our Saturday breakfasts must stop to protect Laura’s health. I held my breath and hugged her. My school shut down mid-March, and I was allowed to teach online from home last year — to about 900 students in grades 1-4. I sent long emails describing what that was like, and she was fascinated by my reports. She said she was picking up groceries, staying in her condo, and of course, continuing her research and advocacy. In the spring I asked if we could get together again, and although she didn’t say no, she closed by wishing me and my famliy good health and happy lives. I knew that it was her way of saying good-bye.
LikeLike
Dear ArtTeacher: That was SO powerful. THANK YOU for taking to time to put out such a beautiful, heartfelt presentation.
LikeLike
Really appreciate this.
LikeLike
Thank you for this wonderful tribute to a great mentor.
LikeLike
That you for filling out the picture we have of Laura. How wonderful to have such a sustaining friendship that stretched some 50 years!
LikeLike
Wow, Art Teacher. Thanks for this remembrance!
LikeLike
So sad to hear this. RIP Laura. You are loved.
LikeLike
So sorry to hear this.
LikeLike