If you want to hear about my new book, I will be discussing it at the Century Foundation, 1 Whitehall Street, in Manhattan on Monday, September 23 at 6 pm.
Admission is free but you must register.
The moderator will be Greg Anrig, who writes thoughtfully about education issues.
Some callers were told the event is sold out, but I understand that the foundation plans to add additional seating, so don’t give up.
I can’t wait to read Jersey Jazzman’s review of “Reign of Error.” Here is an excerpt from the book.
It appears next week.
Can’t wait!
My new book will be officially published on September 17.
It is titled Reign of Error: The Hoax of the
Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public
Schools. The publisher is Alfred A. Knopf, the nation’s
most distinguished publishing house. It will dispel many of the
myths and half-truths that have been repeated again and again in
recent years in an effort to discredit public education.
I will travel and lecture across the country. I won’t travel as much as I
would like to, as I must preserve my health and energy. I will
donate most of my speaking fees to the Network for Public
Education.
The schedule below is subject to change and I
will add more details later, but this is a heads-up about where I
will be speaking:
September 10:
Elmhurst, IL Elmhurst
College 7:00 pm
September 11
New York City Judson Memorial Church,
Washington Square 6 pm
September 16:
Pittsburgh:
Temple Sinai
5505 Forbes Avenue in Squirrel Hill neighborhood. 6 pm
September 17:
Philadelphia Free Library.
Montgomery Auditorium 6 pm.
September 23
New York City
The Century Foundation
1 Whitehall St., NYC
(Call for
reservation) 6 pm
September 25
Denver
North HIgh School
2960 N. Speer Blvd. 7 pm
September 26
Seattle
University of Washington
Kane Hall 130 7 pm
September 27
Sacramento
Memorial Auditorium
6:30 pm
September 28
Berkeley
Martin Luther King Middle School
1781 Rose Street.
7 pm
September 30
Stanford University
Cubberley Auditorium
6 pm
October 1
Los Angeles
Occidental College
Thorne Hall 7 pm
October 2
California State University
18111 Nordhoff St
Northridge,CA. 7 pm
October 5
Washington, DC
National Superintendents
Roundtable
Limited to registered superintendents
October 8
Congregation Beth Elohim,
274 Garfield Place
Park Slope, Brooklyn 7:30 pm
October 10
Northern Michigan University
Marquette, Michigan 7:30 pm
October 15
Kingston, RI.
University of Rhode Island,
School of Education 6:30 pm
October 17
Long Branch, New Jersey
New Jersey Principals and Supervisors Association (Limited to members)
9:30-10:30am
October 18
Washington, DC
Lunch event at Economic Policy Institute
Book signing at Politics and Prose bookstore
October 23:
Dartmouth College
Vermont School Boards Association
Alumni Hall 7:30 pm
November 1: Atlanta
United Way.
Georgia Tech
Hotel and Conference Center. 8 am.
November 4
Princeton, NJ
Community Forum, 4 pm
Princeton University Public Lecture 8 pm
November 13:
Chicago
First Free Church
5255 N. Ashland Avenue
7:30 pm
November 22
Richmond, VA.
Virginia Education Association
I intend to keep the schedule and details updated
on my website at dianeravitch.com.
Ken Previti was puzzled that the U.S. Department of
Education paid someone to “monitor” what I wrote. Here
is his response to the latest effort to discredit my criticism of
corporate reform.
Why should the government monitor
critics? How does it feel to know that the U.S. government is
watching you and monitoring what you write? At the time, I heard
rumors about it, but I didn’t believe it. Now I feel as though I
was on Nixon’s famous Enemies’ List. It is a distinction I wear
with pride. I am praying for the strength and health to stand up for those of you who spend their your days in our nation’s schools, doing the hard work of educating children.
Thank you for having my back. Your protection means more to me than you will ever know.
Forgive a moment of exultation. That’s the moment when the first hardcover copy of your book arrives, and you know it is real. And it has a beautiful handwritten note from a great editor.
The editor for “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools” was Victoria Wilson. She is probably, no, certainly, the best editor in American publishing today. She has been an editor at Knopf for more than 40 years. She bought the book for Knopf, and she oversaw every detail of its production, including the typeface and the jacket design. She is a product of public education, and she immediately understood the importance of the subject.
I am more than thrilled that Knopf is publishing the book. It published the books of my mentor Lawrence A. Cremin, the great historian of American education, as well as the classic works of Richard Hofstadter. Knopf also published my 2003 book, “The Language Police.”
The cover is a vivid orange. As I put it on my bookshelf, where my books are arranged in chronological order, I noticed something amusing. My very first book, “The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973,” used orange on the jacket also, but not as a background color. Beginning and end.
What I try to do in this book is to set the record straight about the condition of American education. i have chapters and graphs presenting the evidence about test scores, high school graduation rates, college graduation rates, and international test scores, as well as chapters on the nature of the privatization movement, the rhetoric it uses, and its goals. I go beyond the delineation of the false narrative of decline to offer a full palate of research-based, evidence-based proposals to improve schools and the conditions in which children grow up. School and society are intertwined. I do not claim, as some critics allege, that poverty is the sole cause of poor test scores. I believe we must improve schools and do lots more to improve the lives of children and families. If we ignore poverty, all our school reform efforts will fail.
If I am an optimist, it is because I believe in the promise of America. I believe that Ponzi schemes and scare tactics ultimately fail. Bad ideas fail and fail, and at some point their failure becomes too obvious to ignore. I trust in the common sense of the American people. They will not knowingly abandon their public schools to the whims and follies of the market. The market goes up, the market goes down. The market has winners and losers. The principle of American education is equality of educational opportunity, not a market that practices risk management and sheds the losers from its portfolio.
It is my goal to provide people with the knowledge they need to support the children, the families, and the schools of their community.
Peter Cunningham launched a harsh attack on me and my forthcoming book, “Reign of Error.” I assume he has not read it as it won’t be available for a few more weeks. Some 200 comments were posted on his article, almost none supporting his intemperate accusations. One of them was a silly claim that I don’t want minorities to go to college, refuted here and in the book and many other places.
Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center, responds to Cunningham’s diatribe here.
Welner notes that Cunningham’s argument echoes the talking points of the far-right Heritage Foundation.
Because of my new book, which won’t be available until September 18, I fully expect the corporate reform attack machine to come after me. They have invested a lot of energy in charters, vouchers, merit pay, stripping teachers of tenure, collective bargaining rights, pensions, etc. despite the lack of any evidence that these strategies improve education. It makes them angry to be reminded that their plans have failed again and again.
So I was not surprised when I heard that Secretary Arne Duncan’s former Assistant Secretary for Communications lashed out at me in an article on the Huffington Post. I decided to ignore it.
But others did not. Paul Thomas wrote a response here.
Susan Ohanian called it “a whiny rant.”
Read the comments following his article.
This reader, Timothy Quinn, received an advanced reading copy (ARC) of my book. Here is his review, proving the power of social media:
“I’ve had the privilege of reading an ARC of “Reign of Error.” It is an important book for anyone interested in preserving what’s left of our democracy. I’m president of my local board of education and the ARC is making the rounds among my colleagues. I look forward to meeting you when you visit our town in November. A lot of suburban districts feel insulated from the privatization movement, but we’ve seen firsthand how even independent suburban charters are an inefficient use of tightly-capped public resources that benefit a few while not reflecting diverse learning populations. We dodged the bullet of a language-immersion charter and sued the commissioner of education to prevent a circumventing of charter rules to approve virtual charters. The threat to EVERYONE is very real, which makes “Reign” required reading even for those happy with their schools in communities that are willing to fund open public education. We must remain vigilant.”
Sara Mosle reviewed
my book in The Atlantic, which is unusual because it
won’t be published for another month. I have read Sara’s work over
the years and always found her thoughtful. She is now teaching in a
charter school. There are a few things I don’t agree with here,
starting with the claim that I was the “architect” of the corporate
reform movement. I had nothing to do with the writing of No Child
Left Behind or Race to the Top. At worst, I was a cheerleader for NCLB on
the sidelines, but that doesn’t make me the “architect.” And I publicly recanted my support three years ago.
I also question her implied suggestion that I am far too energetic for a
woman my age, that I blog too much, tweet too much, am too active
altogether. Maybe I should retire to a rocker and take up knitting.
You can’t really evaluate what she writes because no one except the
publisher and a few advance readers has actually read the book. But
clearly she was not happy about my criticism of charter schools.
She is fond of KIPP. It gets high test scores. I don’t like the
idea of charter chains, it is true. I think they destroy
communities and some get their high scores by excluding the most
needy students.
KIPP may be a wonderful chain, but it has yet to
accept the challenge of managing an entire district, leaving no
child behind. KIPP is one charter chain of 100-plus schools, but there are more than 6,000 charters, some good, some mediocre, some run by incompetents some run to take advantage of tax breaks. Typically, research concludes that charters get the same results when they enroll the same demographic. What, exactly, is the rationale for having a dual system, one that can push out kids it doesn’t want, the other required to take them all?
I was disappointed that Sara did not directly address
the central theme of the book, which is my criticism of
privatization and the danger it poses to the very survival of
public education. I think that deserved discussion.
Despite my reservations, I am grateful to have received a relatively even-handed review
from a knowledgeable journalist whose work I have respected over
the years.
In November, New Yorkers will elect a new mayor.
It matters a lot for the future of public education in the city.
The mayor has complete control of the city school system.
The mayor appoints 8 of 13 members of the city school board, who serve at his pleasure. If one of his appointees dares to disagree with him, the mayor may fire him or her on the spot.
Mayor Bloomberg has closed more than 100 schools and opened hundreds more. He has closed some of the schools that he opened. What matters most to the mayor is test scores. He grades students, schools, teachers, and principals by test scores.
The scores went up and up until 2010, when the State Education Department admitted the tests got easier every year. Overnight the “Néw York City miracle” disappeared.
Recently, the mayor embraced the Common Core standards. When the test results came out, the scores of 2012 collapsed, the achievement gaps grew larger, and the mayor said all this was “very good news.”
The mayor is devoted to charter schools. Although he is responsible for the public schools, he prefers privately managed charters and plans to open four of his own, as soon as he leaves office. His DOE is already setting aside the free space for these schools that will be created by billionaires Bloomberg and George Soros.
The results of Bloomberg’s “reforms” are unimpressive. Despite boasts to the contrary, he did not close the achievement gaps.
A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute found that the three “market-reform” districts–NYC, DC, and Chicago–got worse results than other urban districts.
The public is fed up with the Bloomberg era of imperial, autocratic “reform.” The latest polls show that only 22% want the next mayor to continue Bloomberg’s school reforms.
What’s next?
I fear that most of the candidates are trapped in Bloomberg’s cramped data-driven vision of schooling.
I want the next mayor to think about how to improve education, not how to raise test scores.
I want the next mayor to stop closing public schools. I want him or her to abandon Bloomberg’s obsession with testing and measurement. I want the mayor to stop giving absurd letter grades to schools. We learned from the Tony Bennett scandal just how malleable and how meaningless the A-F letter grades are.
I want the next mayor to take responsibility for the 95% of the students in the city’s public schools, not act as a cheerleader for the charter sector that enrolls 5% and kicks out or excludes low-scoring students.
I want a mayor who has a different vision.
I want a mayor who believes that it is his or her responsibility to provide a good school in every neighborhood. I want a mayor who is devoted to strengthening the schools, not closing them or privatizing them. I want a mayor who understands that improving the lives of children, families, and communities will improve schools. I want a mayor committed to early childhood education, to class size reduction, and to the arts in every school.
I want a mayor determined to make sure that every school has a full curriculum, experienced teachers, daily physical education, foreign languages, and adequate resources to help children who are learning English and children with disabilities.
I have an even more radical idea: Here is an interview I did recently on NY1, the local news station. Watch to hear what I propose. If the mayor acted on my proposal, he or she would become a national figure and an instant hero to millions of parents, students, and teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 