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Mercedes Schneider to Betsy DeVos: How the Federal Government Failed America’s Public Schools

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2020 //
16

Mercedes Schneider listened to Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos deride what they call “America’s failing government schools.”

She writes that these two deep thinkers put the hyphen in the wrong place. To understand what has happened over the past two decades, you must realize that the schools have been victimized by failing-government policies, by policies based on flawed theories and uninformed hunches, starting with a “Texas miracle” that never happened and followed by federal mandates that were unrealistic and just plain dumb.

Who failed? Not the schools. The politicians.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing

TIME: How “Education Reform” Has Failed America

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2020 //
19

This article in TIME summarizes my new book SLAYING GOLIATH.

Read the book to learn the stories of the brave heroes who have stood up to billionaires, financiers, and profiteers intent on harming the democratic institution of public education.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

Wisconsin Gave DeVos and Pence the Cold Shoulder for “School Choice Week”!

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2020 //
10

Sorry to have missed this great story when Jan Resseger posted it. i happened to have been down and out with the flu. This is a story I wish I could include in SLAYING GOLIATH. The perpetrators returned to the scene of their crime and are shunned!

Jan Resseger writes:

Wisconsin and Ohio have the oldest school choice programs in the United States.  Milwaukee’s voucher program is 30 years old and the Cleveland Voucher Program is 24 years old.  Both states have expanded vouchers statewide beyond the two cities where they began. It ought to be a red flag that in these two states with the oldest programs, National School Choice Week may have been more contentious than anywhere else in the country.

National School Choice Week in Wisconsin

Last week Vice President Mike Pence and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos went to Madison, Wisconsin’s capital city, to honor National School Choice Week, a celebration of vouchers and charter schools that was established and is promoted every year by groups like the American Federation for Children—the group DeVos herself helped found and to which she has regularly donated generously—and Jeb Bush’s ExcelinEd.

Pence and DeVos were not welcomed by Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor Tony Evers, who skipped the event altogether. Before he was elected governor, Evers was the state’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, and before that he was a public school educator. Evers has devoted his career to leading and promoting the state’s public schools.

Neither Pence nor DeVos was welcomed by the Capital Times in Madison, which editorialized: “Pence parrots the talking points of the wealthy campaign donors he has always served…. That’s what Pence did Tuesday in Madison… Pence was promoting ongoing efforts to undermine public education with the usual cabal of billionaire-funded advocates for the agenda of the Trump-Pence administration’s ‘school choice’ agenda… Out-of-state billionaires like DeVos and politicians like Pence have for years targeted Wisconsin in their efforts to promote ‘school choice’ initiatives. They got traction when one of their lackeys, Republican Gov. Scott Walker, was in office. But Walker, a Pence crony, was swept out of office in 2018 by a supporter of public education, Democrat Tony Evers.”

The Capital Times‘ editorial board adds that this year, there has been pressure against school privatization in the city of Milwaukee itself: “(I)n the spring of 2019, critics of school choice and school privatization schemes swept school board elections in Milwaukee, the state’s largest city… Key to the pushback against the ‘school choice’ advocates was the activism of African American and Latino Milwaukeeans, and the determination of groups such as Black Leaders Organizing for Communities (BLOC) and Voces de la Frontera Action, Inc. to defend public education.”

On the very same day Pence and DeVos came to Madison to extol school choice, the Capital Times‘ Briana Reilly reportedthat State Representative, Jonathan Brostoff joined fellow Democratic lawmakers and public school advocates to reintroduce a bill that would phase out Wisconsin vouchers and reinstate a Student Achievement Guarantee in Education, to reduce public school class sizes and upgrade the curriculum in participating public schools.

Executive Director of the statewide Wisconsin Public Education Network, Heather DuBois Bourenane endorsed the Public Education Reinvestment Act being introduced. First she explained specific problems with private schools that receive vouchers: “They do not answer to a locally elected school board. They do not have to follow laws protecting students with disabilities. They do not have to follow the same stringent reporting and hiring requirements as public schools. They can use curriculum that is religious, unvetted and unscientific. They can—and frequently do—‘counsel out’ students who do not meet expectations, distorting the data on their performance and creating unfunded cost burdens for local public schools. This is unethical and we know it is wrong.”

As in other states, Wisconsin’s legislature has created “school choice” programs, but the same state legislature has neglected to pass the taxes that would fund the programs. In Wisconsin and other states, vouchers and charter schools have been funded at the expense of public schools. DuBois Bourenane described the fiscal disaster thrust on Wisconsin’s public schools by ever-expanding school vouchers: “Wisconsin is spending $351,180,390.29 this year to provide taxpayer funded tuition vouchers to 43,450 students at 317 schools, nearly 100 percent of which are religious schools. We know that nearly all of the students in the statewide program already attended these private schools… There are over 860,000 children whose parents choose to send them to the public schools that are the heart of our communities; public schools that accept, embrace, and proudly serve ALL students. Yet data from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau shows that even as the unaccountable voucher program has been recklessly expanded, our public schools have been increasingly underserved by the state. According to the Wisconsin Budget Project, ‘In 2021, the state will invest less in public school districts than it did in 2011…. In 2021, Wisconsin school districts will receive $75 million less in state aid than in 2011 in inflation-adjusted dollars.’”

National School Choice Week In Ohio

Tomorrow, February 1, parents are scheduled to begin claiming vouchers for Ohio’s EdChoice Voucher Program for the 2020-2021 school year, but as of this morning, nobody knows what the program will look like or how many students will be able to qualify.

As Jan has previously posted, Ohio’s legislators don’t care about the public schools that most students attend. They are obsessed with charters (most of which are failing) and vouchers (even though the only research on the Ohio program shows that it harms children, who lose ground in math and make no gains in reading).

But isn’t it wonderful to see the two big Goliaths—DeVos and Pence—get a chilly reception when they arrive in Madison  to celebrate School  Voice Week? I will save this for the next edition of SLAYING GOLIATH. The Resistance is winning in Wisconsin!

As the Beatles sang, “Money can’t buy you love.”

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Pence, Privatization, Resistance, Vouchers, Wisconsin

Indianapolis: The Resistance Is Fighting the Well-Funded Disruptors

By dianeravitch
February 4, 2020 //
8

Professor Jim Scheurich read a recent article in the rightwing, anti-public school journal “Education Next” about Indianapolis, which he thought was fundamentally flawed.

He sent the following analysis of what’s really happening in Indianapolis:

 

A RECENT ARTICLE IN EDUCATION NEXT

COMPLETELY MISREPRESENTS

THE RECENT HISTORY OF INDIANAPOLIS K12 EDUCATION

Dr. Jim Scheurich

Urban Education Studies Doctoral Program

Indiana University – Indianapolis (IUPUI) Professor

President, IPS Community Coalition

 

Unfortunately, a recent article in the pro-charter, pro-neoliberal “magazine,” called Education Next, is a thorough misrepresentation of the recent history of Indianapolis K12 education (see https://www.educationnext.org/hoosier-way-good-choices-for-all-indianapolis/).  I know because, as a university professor and a community activist, I have spent the last seven years working against the pro-charter, pro-neoliberal efforts in Indianapolis, mainly through the IPS Community Coalition, a citywide grassroots organization, and through anactivist research group of doctoral students, community members, and university faculty.  Below, I am going to point out eight ways this Education Next “story” is distorted and deceptive.  

1. The real cause of the “schooling crisis” in Indianapolis was racism and desegregation as many whites who could afford to do so moved out of the city, as did much business and capital, along with the ongoing effects of local, long-term racist policies and practices.  

In the Education Next (EN) article, there is not a single reference to race, desegregation, and racism.  Indeed, these words are never used (except as labels in one chart) even though the history of Indianapolis schooling cannot be accurately and fairly storied without these. In addition, there is no mention of the ongoing racism in law enforcement and imprisonment, housing, education, medicine, employment, banking, and the media, which exists in all cities and is well documented in social science research. These exclusions are a loud absence that is unquestionably remarkable and certainly a mark of weak and/or distorted scholarship.  Why would anyone who wanted to tell an honest “Hoosier” education story leave these out?  At a minimum, it certainly makes one wonder about the real nature and agenda of this EN story.

2. No mention of the pro-charter neoliberal movement that has “Mind Trust” and “Stand for Children” like organizations in every major city and several smaller ones in the U.S.

The Mind Trust and Stand for Children in Indianapolis like to keep their “story” local so those who work for them and the Indianapolis public remain ignorant about their true nature. The Mind Trust and Stand for Children never discuss that they are part of a national neoliberal movement largely funded by conservative and right–wing individuals, organizations, and corporations.  They never discuss the wider agenda of this movement, which includes low taxes for the wealthy, decreased funding for social supports, the privatization of and profiteering off of public services (like public education), efforts to decrease the voting power of people of color, the end of unions (esp. teachers unions) and the benefits unions have developed, among other ways that decrease the quality of life for everyone but the 1% and those who serve them.  Also, Mind Trust and Stand for Children never discuss the strongly anti-democratic nature of the neoliberal movement.  To begin to educate yourself on this national movement, read these highly respected books, in this order, MacLean’s ”Democracy in Chains,” Mayer’s “Dark Money,“ and Lipman’s “The New Political Economy of Urban Education.”  

3. No mention of the key role of ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) in the Mind Trust/Stand for Children story.

ALEC is a conservative-rightwing organization that creates model state-level neoliberal legislation to assist in institutionalizing the state-level neoliberal agenda discussed above in #2.  ALEC considers Indiana to be one of its favorite states, as Indiana Republicans and some Democrats have implemented so much ALEC developed legislation.  The result has been that Indiana consistently ranks high in business-friendly policies and effects and among the lowest in quality of life policies and effects.  Lengthy discussions and critiques of ALEC and its agenda are widely available, but there is no doubt ALEC is pushing a radical agenda that would not be supported if voted on by the general public.  

4. No mention of the “dark money” funding of Mind Trust/Stand for Children supported school board members.  

Since the 2012 board election in Indianapolis, the Mind Trust and Stand for Children have covertly used a Stand for Children 501c4 headquartered in Oregon to funnel national money into the Indianapolis school board race.  Before this, any everyday citizen who could put together funding of $3-5,000 had a chance to win election to the school board.  Starting in 2012, we know that the Mind Trust and Stand for Children started providing around $65,000 to each of their chosen candidates with all of them winning as no one was expecting or prepared for this infusion of such large amounts.  In the next election, 2014, they did the same and took majority control of the board, even though one of their chosen candidates, Gayle Cosby, turned against them once she realized what their real agenda was.  We call this “dark money” because a 501c4 does not have to report where the funds came from or how they were spent and not one of their candidates have publicly admitted this support.  In fact, it took the IPS Community Coalition shouting loudly about this for some time before the local news media paid any attention and still do not sufficiently attend to this, especially since in the last election, our best guess is that they spent over $500,000 on a district wide seat (more on this below).  Recently, the head of Stand for Children, who is widely praised in the EN article, said on social media that the Indianapolis Stand for Children has no relationship to the 501c4 in Oregon, leaving us puzzled as to how the Oregon folks know whom to support.  

5. Even though the “Innovation” schools (stealth charters inside the district) are widely praised, there is no discussion of constant reports to the IPS Community Coalition that the district leadership uses deception, misrepresentations (to put it politely), and threats to stop resistance and garner parent and teacher support for converting a traditional school to an “innovation” school.  

Either lots of teachers and parents are lying to the IPS Community Coalition, or the districts is using strong arm tactics to institute “innovation” schools.  Indeed, many teachers report to us that they feel afraid of the district leadership, given the district’s rough shod ways of getting what the district wants.  Also, there is no mention of the fact that for their first three years, the “innovation” schools are under easier state accountability rules.  Thus, the Mind Trust and Stand for Children often brag that the “innovation” schools are doing “better” even though traditional schools, which are under the full accountability rules, are actually doing better.  Might we call this dissembling?

6. No mention of the utter failure to successfully  educate Black children, who are the majority of IPS students, and no mention of the use of home schooling and high discipline rates to push out Black children.

Despite that we know that testing experts say we cannot use state accountability exams in the way we do, it is a harsh fact that less than 6% of Black 10th graders recently passed both the state’s language arts exam and the math exam.  If any business (the favorite neoliberal model) had this terrible outcome, that business would be shut down or all the leadership fired.  This is totally appalling—and never mentioned.  In addition, an intrepid local Chalkbeat reporter found compelling evidence that some schools have been counseling the parents of primarily Black students to choose to home school instead of facing a discipline incident result, a move that takes this student off the school’s roles and improves the school’s standing.  That this has the high potential to negatively impact the entire life of these Black students does not seem important to the decision makers, even though local Black activists, like Diane Daniels, have been pointing this out for years.  Furthermore, other schools, sometime called “no excuses” schools, use really high levels of discipline to push out primarily Black students that they see as potentially hurting their schools’ state grade, even though local education activists, like John Harris Loflin, have been making this point for years.  That all of this is totally disastrous for Black students, their families, their communities, and all of Indianapolis does not seem important enough to mention in the EN story.

7. Substantial problems with the CREDO and Indiana University (IU) research cited in the EN article are not addressed.

There is no mention of the deep critique of the CREDO report and its methodology, even though the University of Colorado’s National Education Policy Center (neps.colorado.edu) has published more than one critique of the CREDO methodology and their reports.  Also, no mention that the CREDO reports are done by a center that receives large pro-charter funding.  Furthermore, the IU research has been cited locally and nationally but never publicly released, as far as I have been able to determine.  I was able to get a copy of it, but since others have ownership, I cannot release it.  I did a thorough, indepth critique of it, showing it to be flawed in multiple ways but cannot publish since the research continues not to be public.  I mentioned that publicizing but not publishing results was against social science practice and ethics. I even asked that it be released, but they have stopped communicating with me even though I am part of the same university system.  

8. Nothing on the persistent incompetency of the Ferebee administration.  (Ferebee left last year to go to Washington, DC.  Fight hard, everyday DC folks!)

The examples of incompetency are many and large.  First, closing of high schools is almost always a fraught endeavor.  Nonetheless, there are good superintendents around the country who have figured out how to have authentic, transparent conversations with their communities and arrive at collaborative decisions.  I have met and talked to some of these folks.  It is never easy, and some community people are not happy in the end, but overall the community can feel it was done fairly and transparently.  That was not the case in Indianapolis.  Second, without consulting even with their friends and natural allies, like the Chamber of Commerce and the Board of Realtors, Ferebee went public with little time left before the vote with a nearly one billion–dollar bond proposal.  Even their friends and allies said, “NO!”  After an inappropriate Chamber study of cost cutting for the district, the district cut to around a quarter of the original amount to get Chamber and other elite support.  In addition, good superintendents know that it takes one to one and a half years of hard work to prepare for a successful bond election, and even that is no guarantee.  Ferebee seemed not to know this.  He did though get his quarter million because he committed most of it to raising teacher salaries, which even his critics supported.  Third, the district’s public budget document was opaque and confusing, even after having been critiqued by a non-political national organization that examines such documents nationwide.  After two years of pushing, we got some improvements.  Fourth, busing has consistently been a mess, which they now think they are solving by privatizing it. Fifth, teachers districtwide have become very afraid of raising any issues because they believe they will be fired.  Sixth, even though there is a large amount of research nationally as to what it takes to create successful urban schools for all children, regardless of race and ethnicity, family income, sexuality, disability status, and immigration status (some of which I have published), the Ferebee administration did not seem to know any of this.  Instead, initiating “innovation” schools and supporting charter schools that replaced district schools seemed to be his only choices.  

The neoliberal so-called education “reform” movement is weaker than they seem despite their millions of dollars and their PR machine.  

The IPS Community Coalition is a multi-race, multi-class citywide coalition of everyday Indianapolis folks and local organizations (see us on Facebook) who started a little over three years ago.  We began with less than eight people sitting in a room together, and now we have over 250 members.  We are very active on Facebook and sometimes have over 6,000 eyes on our posts.  We have no money, and many of our members have little. We do support teachers’ unions and work with the local teachers’ union.  In the 2018 school board election, we defeated two of the Mind Trust and Stand for Children incumbents.  The only race they won was due to the candidate being a non-incumbent.  In our best understanding, they spent over a half million dollars on their districtwide candidate, while the person we supported defeated their candidate on less than $10,000.  Because of their losses in the last election, now they are bringing back some of the most well-known local founders of their movement and trying to fake the community engagement that we authentically do.  They do have millions of dollars, many fulltime and part-time employees, and a large PR machine that falsely uses civil rights language, but they can be defeated.  

Study what neoliberalism is in education and other areas of your community.  

An activated people can defeat money and power.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Fraud, Funding, Indianapolis, Privatization, Resistance

Valerie Strauss: Founder of IDEA Charter Chain Apologizes for Spendthrift Ways

By dianeravitch
February 4, 2020 //
27

Valerie Strauss writes here about the abject apology by Tom Torkelsen of the IDEA corporate charter chain for his company’s lavish spending.

The head of a Texas-based charter school chain publicly apologized for “really dumb and unhelpful” plans that included leasing a private jet for millions of dollars and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on San Antonio Spurs tickets.

It’s not the first time he has acknowledged errors in the chain’s operations.

Tom Torkelson, chief executive of IDEA Public Schools, issued a letter (see in full below) to the IDEA community saying he has sometimes “pushed us to a place that’s hard to defend” in his effort to be “entrepreneurial and different from traditional education systems.”

“I’m sorry I put IDEA and our friends in that position,” he said.

Charter schools are publicly funded but privately operated. Supporters say they offer valuable alternatives to families that do not like their neighborhood schools. Critics say they drain resources from traditional public school districts that educate the vast majority of students and that they are part of a movement to privatize public education.

IDEA was started in Texas by two alumni from Teach for America and has nearly 100 campuses in that state and Louisiana serving nearly 53,000 students. According to its audit for 2018 and 2019, IDEA has more than $1.13 billion in assets. It has received more than $200 million from the federal Charter Schools Program over the past decade and has plans to expand rapidly in the next few years.

The chain markets itself as having a 100 percent college acceptance rate. It doesn’t mention that acceptance to a four-year college is a requirement for graduation, which would presumably be a disincentive to enroll for students who do not want to attend college.

Torkelson recently backed off a plan to lease a private jet for $2 million a year — for six years — after the Houston Chronicle and a state teachers union raised questions about it. Torkelson had said the lease would allow IDEA executives to fly to states where the network is expanding.

After Torkelsen’s apology, IDEA bought an ad during the SuperBowl, which cost millions. Big spenders gotta spend bigly!

This past year, Betsy DeVos gave IDEA over $100 million from the federal Charter Schools Program (aka, her private slush fund).

How does a chain of schools amass over $1 billion in assets?

If anyone can answer that question, please post it here as a comment.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Texas

A Podcast at Books and Books in Miami

By dianeravitch
February 2, 2020 //
15

The first stop on my national book tour was Books and Books, a wonderful old-fashioned independent bookstore in Coral Gables in Florida. I talked with Mitchell Kaplan, the owner, who is determined to keep the literary life alive.

This is our discussion.

After the podcast, I met with the leadership of the United Teachers of Dade County. My presentation at the store was moderated by Karla Hernandez-Mats, the leader of the union and a dynamo.

The Republican legislature is hostile to public schools and would like every child to have a voucher to attend a religious school.

 

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Florida, For-Profit, Privatization, Vouchers

TIME Magazine: How the “Reform” Movement Has Failed America

By dianeravitch
February 1, 2020 //
52

This article just appeared in TIME magazine, explaining how the “education reform” movement has failed America. 

This short article encapsulates the themes of my book SLAYING GOLIATH. Piling on tests and punishments for students and teachers and closing schools doesn’t solve any problems, and it certainly doesn’t improve education.

The article gives a much abbreviated history of “reform” from George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Betsy DeVos. Testing and choice, they assumed, would fix all the problems.

Not true.

For almost twenty years, the Bush-Obama-Trump program of standardized testing, punitive accountability, and school choice has been the reform strategy. It has utterly failed.

So the question remains: How do we improve our schools? We begin by recognizing that poverty and affluence are the most important determinants of test scores. This strong correlation shows up on every standardized test. Every standardized test is normed on a bell curve that reflects family income and education; affluent kids always dominate the top, and poor kids dominate the bottom. Nearly half the students in this country now qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, which is the federal measure of poverty. We can ameliorate the impact of poverty on children and families by making sure that they have access to nutrition, medical care, and decent housing. Pregnant women need medical care to ensure that their children are born healthy.

If the billionaires supporting charter schools and vouchers are serious about improving education, they would insist that the federal government fully fund the education of students with disabilities and triple the funding for schools in low-income districts. Teachers should be paid as the professionals that they are, instead of having to work at second or third jobs to make ends meet. Teachers should write their own tests, as they did for generations. States and districts should save the billions now wasted on standardized testing and spend it instead to reduce class sizes so children can get individualized help from their teacher.

Children and schools need stability, not disruption. They need experienced teachers and well-maintained schools. All children need schools that have a nurse, counselors, and a library with a librarian. Children need time to play every day. They need nutrition and regular medical check-ups.

All of this is common sense. These are reforms that work.

There comes a time for Bill Gates and other billionaires to acknowledge that what they have done has failed. That time is now.

 

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Privatization, Testing

A TEACHER Writes a Great Review of SLAYING GOLIATH in the Washington Post!

By dianeravitch
February 1, 2020 //
6

Melanie McCabe, an English teacher at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia, and an author, wrote this terrific and accurate review of SLAYING GOLIATH.

Unlike the reviewer for the New York Times, who is not a teacher and gives no hint of ever having set foot in a classroom since she finished school and college, Melanie McCabe knows full well about the billionaire-funded attacks on public schools and their teachers, which continue to seek their privatization of our public schools and to impose business ideas about closing schools based on spurious data.

Teachers get it. Teachers know that their students are being strangled by high-stakes testing and their schools are deprived of resources when forced to compete with charters and vouchers, which do not offer better education than the public schools they harm.

McCabe writes:

[Ravitch] has written a thought-provoking, painstakingly researched account of those who have sought to privatize and monetize America’s schools. She calls them the “Disrupters,” and they are indeed a foe with all the intimidating strength of Goliath. Confronting this opponent is the “Resistance”: the ordinary teachers, parents and citizens who are fighting back and winning.

Ravitch exposes the self-serving motivations of the Disrupters — many of them among the richest people in America, such as the Walton family, Bill Gates, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Koch brothers and Mark Zuckerberg. Their belief that schools should be operated as businesses, with private ownership and data-driven decision-making, has resulted in dismal standardized test scores, the closure of public schools and the demonizing of teachers. The charter schools they have championed and have been enriched by have not resulted in promised improvements, but instead have drained much-needed funds from struggling public schools. The Disrupters are not supporters of education, Ravitch argues; rather, they are in pursuit of the money to be made not only by running charter schools but also through involvement in such lucrative industries as student testing, educational hardware and software, curriculum development, and consulting services…

Though the history of the school reform movement and its impact on schools and students are alarming, the story Ravitch sets out to tell is not one of hand-wringing despair; rather, it is a heartening account of how teachers, parents and union leaders across the nation have been fighting against the damage caused by the Disrupters. The Resistance opposes privatization and misuse or overuse of standardized testing, and seeks adequate compensation for teachers and funding for public schools that has too long been diverted to charter schools….

Ravitch’s message is not one of gloom and doom, but rather she offers a rallying cry that shows how people everywhere are wising up and fighting back. “The great lesson of this story is that billionaires should not be allowed to buy democracy, although they are certainly trying to do so,” Ravitch writes. “The power of their money can be defeated by the power of voters.”

There is much to learn from this book, and much inspiration to be found. The book is not written as a how-to guide for the Resistance. It is a scrupulously thorough study of a tumultuous period in American education. However, the conscientious reader who seeks strategies to combat the pervasive damage done by the Disrupters will find useful information here, along with affirmation that fighting back is possible. To paraphrase one of the chapter titles, Goliath has stumbled. The reign of terror is not yet over, but it has been brought to its knees.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

Bob Shepherd Reviews Annie Murphy Paul’s Review of SLAYING GOLIATH in the “New York Times“

By dianeravitch
January 30, 2020 //
53

Bob Shepherd has worked as an editor, author, assessment developer, curriculum writer, and most recently a classroom teacher in Florida.

In this post, he reviews the review of my book SLAYING GOLIATH, which was written by journalist Annie Murphy Paul and published in the New York Times Book Review.

To summarize, he thought the review was uninformed and mean-spirited.

He writes:

On January 21, 2020, Annie Murphy Paul’s “review” of Diane Ravitch’s Slaying Goliathappeared in The New York Times. Being reviewed in the Times is a big deal.  Such a review affects public opinion and sales. That’s why a hatchet job done on a truly important book is truly irresponsible.

In her new book, education historian Ravitch presents a recent history of the popular resistance to an “Education Reform Movement” led by billionaires interested in

  • privatizing U.S. PreK-12 education via charter schools and vouchers,
  • foisting upon the country a single set of national “standards,”
  • busting teachers’ unions,
  • selling depersonalized education software, and
  • evaluating students, teachers, and schools based on high-stakes standardized tests.

Here’s Ms. Paul’s opening salvo:

“She came. She saw. She conquered.”

This opening is, of course, an allusion to the boast about his role in the Gallic Wars attributed to Julius Caesar by Appian, Plutarch, and Suetonius—Veni, vidi, vici (I came, I saw, I conquered). Caesar’s is doubtless the most famous boast in Western history, and the allusion is meant to be deflating. Technically, the term for what Ms. Paul is attempting here is bathos, a powerful rhetorical technique in which one plunges from the sublime into the ridiculous. She means to ridicule Ravitch as someone who sees herself as the great conqueror of the “Reform Movement.” Paul’s implication is that Ravitch’s book is an exercise in self-aggrandizement. That’s a pretty heavy (and nasty) charge with which to begin a review, don’t you think? I do.

And so the reader of Ms. Paul’s review is led, up front, to expect Ravitch’s book to be like Don the Con’s Art of the Deal. Trump’s book (if one can call it that; he didn’t write it) is ostensibly about how to become successful via negotiation, but it’s not, of course, about that. Like everything that comes from Trump’s mouth, this book is actually about Trump—about how great he is. It’s a work of pathological narcissism. Paul leads us to expect that Ravitch’s book, ostensibly about resistance to “Reform” or “Deform,” will actually be about Ravitch, a portrait of herself as conquering hero. But there’s a problem with Paul’s opening (and, as it turns out, her thesis): it’s false and therefore dishonest. Ravitch’s book tells the stories of and heaps praise upon a great many fighters in the Resistance movement, but the one she doesn’t tell us much about at all is the de facto leader, or chief among equals, of that Resistance, Ravitch herself. Throughout, she makes the gift to her readers of inspiring stories of ordinary heroes—students and parents and teachers who spoke truth to power and won. Ravitch’s book is overwhelmingly, clearly, about them. Ravitch rarely appears in her own book, and when she does, it is as someone cheering these others on. (Oligarchs don’t appreciate or understand spontaneously emerging, self-assembling grass roots movements like the Resistance because they think that the only way to get “Out of Many, One’ is via coercion or bribery by an authoritarian.)

As an English teacher, I must give Paul’s opening a D-. Why? Well, there’s a reading issue. Yes, I understand that journalist’s deadlines are tight, and there’s often little time to read the book, write the copy, and submit the piece, but seriously, reviewers are actually supposed to read the books they review. And then there’s the writing issue. One of the most common flaws of puerile writing is the inability to “kill one’s darlings,” as Arthur Quiller-Couch put it. Yes, Ms. Paul, you came up with a cute opening, but it was dishonest, and you or your editor should have put a line through it. Not having done so is, well, in a word, amateurish.

After a little de rigueur background on Ravitch, Paul goes on to attack her for

  • taking an “imperious” tone,
  • engaging in “empty sloganeering and ad hominem attacks,”
  • lacking “the subtle insight and informed judgment for which she was once known,” and
  • being interested primarily “in settling scores and in calling [people] out by name” and cataloguing “her vanquished foes.”

In other words, Ms. Paul makes against Ravitch, in a clearly imperious tone, a clearly ad hominem attack completely lacking in subtle insight and informed judgment.

Let’s consider, first, Ms. Paul’s lack of informed judgment. She blithely accuses Ravitch of “dismissing the call for a common standard as a corporate plot to create a uniform market for educational products” [sic; by “a common standard” Paul means “common standards”; is her reference to “a common standard” simply sloppy writing, or is it an attempt to be more Deformy than the next guy; one can’t tell]. If Ms. Paul had done a little background research, she would have learned that

  • Bill Gates, who made himself the wealthiest nonsovereign person in the world by leveraging ownership of the world’s most widely used personal computer operating system, was approached by Gene Wilhoit of the Council of Chief State School Officers and David Coleman, an education biz entrepreneur, and pitched the idea of a single set of national standards;
  • Gates enthusiastically endorsed the idea, paid for the development of these standards, and then paid out hundreds of millions of dollars (and influenced the spending of 4 trillion in taxpayer funds) to promote them; and
  • he did this, in his own words, so that with a single set of standards, “innovators” could “design tools that a lot of teachers could use.”

In other words, Gates believed that just as the standard Microsoft operating systems led to the creation of products like Word and Excel and other DOS- and then Windows-based PC software, a single set of standards would lead to products of which Gates would likewise approve. As Gates himself put it, a single set of national standards would mean that “[f]or the first time, there will be a large uniform base of customers eager to buy products that can help every kid learn.” Or, as the Gates enabler Joanne Weiss, Chief of Staff to Education Secretary Arne Duncan in charge of Race to the Top, put it:

The development of common standards and shared assessments radically alters the market for innovation in curriculum development, professional development, and formative assessments. Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on a district-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale.

I give Weiss credit. She knew exactly what was going down.

So, Gates himself extolled as his purpose precisely the one that Ms. Paul tells us sprang totally from some lunatic imagining on the part of Diane Ravitch, and Gates’s messaging was parroted by his collection of official bobbleheads and action figures. Of course, having one set of national standards would create economies of scale that educational materials monopolists could exploit, enabling them to crowd out smaller competitors. Sound familiar? And Ms. Paul seems not to have noticed that the very corporate plotter who paid for the creation of this single bullet list of national “standards” also created a company, InBloom, the purpose of which was to serve as a gigantic national database of student test scores, grades, and other information. In other words, it would have served as a kind of national gradebook, and curriculum developers, in order to use it, would have had to pay to play, would have had to become “partners” with InBloom, making the Gates company, effectively, the gatekeeper of U.S. curricula. Fortunately, student privacy issues and heroic Resistance fighters like Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters killed that monster in its cradle….

Let’s consider the other charge she lays to Ravitch—a lack of subtle insight. Ms. Paul devotes much of her “review” to attacking Ravitch for giving to “Education Reformers” the title “Disrupters” and calling the opposition the Resistance, with a capital R. Paul is clearly quite incensed by this. One would expect a journalist to understand, having studied political movements and messaging, the value of giving names to movements and messages. But, of course, the education tyro Paul is imagining herself as some objective observer, above factionalism of the kind indulged in by mere mortals like Ravitch. Paul accuses Ravitch of treating the other side unfairly, of not telling their story. Here, again, Paul channels Trump, who infamously referred to the neo-Nazis and their opponents gathered in Charlottesville as the “good people on both sides.” This is the same kind of moronic distortion of a legitimate goal of reporting—that it be fair and balanced—that led journalists, for decades, to report, dutifully, the “two sides to the argument” about whether tobacco caused cancer, that leads them, today, to write as though there were actually two legitimate and opposing scientific views concerning whether anthropogenic climate change is real. Darn that Ida B. Wells, why couldn’t she have been more fair to the Ku Klux Klan? Why did she just report on the lynchings? Darn that Rachel Carson. Why couldn’t she have been more fair to the makers of DDT?  Darn that Greta Thunberg, why can’t she be more fair to Exxon and British Petroleum and Aramco? After all, it’s only the future of the planet at stake.

Putting on, again, my English teacher hat, I must point out another issue with Ms. Paul’s reading: she totally missed the genre of Ravitch’s book. Much of Diane Ravitch’s work over the past few decades is in the grand tradition of the muckraker, represented in our history by people like Lincoln Steffens, Julius Chambers, Nelly Bly, Helen Hunt Jackson, Henry Lloyd, Ambrose Bierce, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, and Ralph Nader. Ravitch’s job, her scary duty, is to call out those doing damage—the wealthy and the powerful—and to do so by name, but this is the very thing, the courageousness with which Ravitch call the powerful to account, to which Ms. Paul objects. (There are so many unintended ironies in Paul’s review that I can’t treat them all, alas.) Ms. Paul’s failure to understand the genre of the book she was reviewing leads her to a catastrophic failure of insight into what Ravitch accomplishes in this book—mapping a constellation of evils and showing how they can be righted….

Ms. Paul’s uniformed, vituperative, shallow, amateurish “review” is entitled “Diane Ravitch Declares the Death of Education Reform.” But, of course, in the book, Ravitch does no such thing. Nowhere in her book does Ravitch claim to have “conquered the forces of Disruption,” as Paul snidely suggests (to be fair, Paul might not be responsible for the headline; newspapers often have dedicated headline writer/editors who do that, but she makes the same spurious accusation in the body of her “review”). So, the “review” is not only wrong from the start; it is wrong before it starts. Slaying Goliath is a powerful reportfrom the beginnings of the battle for the preservation of our sacred democratic institutions from oligarchical control. It’s about schools, certainly, but it has resonances far beyond the classroom. Ms. Paul didn’t get that. But then, again, she didn’t get much about Ravitch’s book, it seems.

Please read Shepherd’s review in full. It is brilliant.

Thus far, the review by Ms. Paul is the only hostile review I have seen, though I don’t expect it will be the only one. It has been heartening to me to seethe outpouring of positive reviews from people who are or were classroom teachers. They are the experts about education whose views I most respect.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

Newark: Mayor Baraka Defends Superintendent After Attacks by Anonymous Posters

By dianeravitch
January 29, 2020 //
20

Superintendent Roger Leon of Newark proposed closing four Newark charter schools. He needs state approval. Suddenly anonymous posters appeared around the city criticizing his decision.  Mayor Ras Baraka defended Leon.

Mayor Ras Baraka is defending the Newark schools chief after anonymous flyers and posters appeared across the city attacking the superintendent’s call to close four charter schools.

In an online message posted Monday evening, Baraka called the posters criticizing Superintendent Roger León “tasteless and sophomoric” and “based on ignorance.” He also defended León’s call for the state to shutter the four charter schools, echoing León’s argument that the charters divert funding from traditional schools and fail to adequately serve students with special needs.

Baraka’s message and the mysterious posters warning “Your school could be next!” are the latest flareup in an escalating dispute over the four charter schools: M.E.T.S., People’s Prep, Roseville Community, and University Heights. The schools are up for renewal, a routine process in which charter schools must apply for state approval to continue operating.

Why anonymous fliers and posters?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Newark, Privatization
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