Arthur Goldstein has taught in New York City public schools for almost thirty years. He has been trying to figure when and how teachers and public schools became objects of scorn rather than respect. He found it in “Reign of Error.”

He writes:

In Reign of Error, Ravitch demonstrates how, by ignoring poverty, America has managed to shift blame to public schools for its consequences. That’s clear when the Governor of New York declares schools with poor test scores deserve the “death penalty,” and the mayor of Chicago closes 50 schools in one fell swoop. The fact that all so-called failing schools have high percentages of high-needs kids is either attributed to coincidence or ignored completely. Standard practice is to replace them with privately run schools that generally perform either no better or much worse. Still, no one can argue they don’t place more tax money into the pockets of investors.

Reign of Error shows us corporate reform is largely about where the money goes. Americans are led to believe teachers earn too much, and entrepreneurs like Rupert Murdoch and the Walmart family earn too little. To correct this inequity, corporate reformers work to erase collective bargaining, unionism, teacher tenure, and other outrages that have left middle-class people able to make a living. This, of course, is all done in the name of helping children.

Stephen Dyer is a former legislator in Ohio who now works for a public policy organization called Innovation Ohio. In my book, I drew on some of his research.

In this post, he situates my work in a longstanding American tradition. I especially liked these lines:

“As I read the book, I couldn’t help but think of what Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835 — that America’s commitment to education for all its citizens, not just landed gentry, was “the originality of American civilization.” The Land Ordinance of 1785, authored by Thomas Jefferson himself, set aside the heart of every community for “public” education — a true revolution coming from our founders who were mostly well-to-do landowners.

“The thought that every child in our country deserves the same opportunities as the most fortunate among us is a uniquely American gift to the world — our great legacy. Ravitch’s passion is rooted in this understanding. It is what gives her purpose so much strength. And it is what gives her latest work undeniable potency.”

Teacher Tom teaches pre-school children in Seattle. He is
also a writer and artist. Here he wonders why the leaders of the
so-called reform movement insist on doing things that never work,
like merit pay, or doubling down on truly bad ideas.

He writes:
“Listen, I don’t know why smart people like Bill Gates (Microsoft),
Arne Duncan (US Secretary of Education), and Rupert Murdoch (News
Corporation) continue to insist that we keep banging our heads into
the wall again and again. But I think I do. As Ravitch writes:
“Their belief in the magical power of money is unbounded. Their
belief in the importance of evidence is not.

Tom writes:

“We are being hoodwinked by “free market” ideologues, people of faith that
put most religious people to shame. It is a faith based upon the
mental experiments of people like Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand,
apostles of selfishness, competition, and the spread sheet
mentality. There is nothing in these people’s world that cannot be
improved by the application corporate “values.” You know, the
values exhibited by the Wall Street hedge fund managers who, of
course, are part of the neoliberal chorus in support these
evidence-free “reforms.”

“This is why they simply cannot accept the
evidence before their eyes: like all fundamentalists they are
incapable of seeing anything that doesn’t exist within their
carefully constructed belief system. They believe the same thing on
Wednesday that they believed on Monday, no matter what happened on
Tuesday.

“This is why they must lie, insisting that our schools are
failing when they are not; that our test scores are too low when
they are the highest they’ve ever been; that our achievement gaps
are growing when they are, in fact, shrinking; that we are falling
behind other nations when we are not; that there are too many
dropouts when our graduation rate is at an all-time high. Heck,
corporate reform poster child Michelle Rhee’s entire “career” is
based upon lies.

“This is why they cannot answer us when we point
these things out, choosing instead to try to deflect our reasoned
response by accusing us of being racists or union thugs or
communists or, as Bill Gates once described Ravitch, “my
enemy.”

Jersey Jazzman connects the dots in his review of “Reign of Error.”

He sees the connection between school and society. He writes:

“There is one chapter in this part of the book that caught me by surprise: “The Toxic Mix,” as frank a discussion of race, inequality, and segregation as I have read in some time. Ravitch’s candor stands in stark contrast to the bromides of the corporate reformers, who have pretty much left any attempts at integration out of their schemes:

(Quoting the book:)
But the wounds caused by centuries of slavery, segregation, and discrimination cannot be healed by testing, standards, accountability, merit pay, and choice. Even if test scores go up in a public or charter school, the structural inequity of society and systematic inequities in our schools remain undisturbed. For every “miracle” school celebrated by the media, there are scores of “Dumpster schools,” where the low-performing students are unceremoniously hidden away. This is not school reform, nor is it social reform. It is social neglect. It is a purposeful abandonment of public responsibility to address deep-seated problems that only public policy can overcome.****

“This may be Ravitch’s best accomplishment in Reign of Error: in defending public education, she forces the conversation back toward the structural deficiencies of our society. Real education reform can only happen when we reform America itself.””””””

I had an online interview today on the national broadcast, NPR’s “On Point.”

We had a very good discussion about the state of American education, the false claims of failure, and the solutions I proffer. We were then joined by a young woman whose name I don’t recall who used to work for Michelle Rhee’s The New Teacher Project (TNTP). She went into the familiar “attack the messenger” mode, saying that I was polarizing, that I needed to compromise, that she (or her organization) had interviewed 50 D.C. insiders, and they agree there is too much testing but are comfortable with the other corporate reform policies.

I pointed out to her that everything in my book is carefully documented, that my data is right from the US Department of Education website. She insists that charter schools are public schools, and I pointed out that when they have been taken to federal court for violating employee’s rights, they insist that they are private corporations acting as contractors and not subject to state laws.

After the program, I was forwarded some questions from listeners, and I answered them.

Paul Thomas reviews “Reign of Error” in the context of what he calls Ravitch 1.0, Ravitch 2.0, and now Ravitch 3.0.

He connects it to earlier works:

“The first twenty chapters of Reign continues a tradition of other important, but too often ignored by politicians and the media, works confronting the false narratives perpetuated about U.S. public education—The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, And The Attack On America’s Public Schools by David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, from the mid-1990s, and Setting the Record Straight: Responses to Misconceptions About Public Education in the U.S. by Gerald Bracey, which followed Berliner and Biddle about a decade later.”

After describing my alternatives to the present failed policies, Thomas writes:

“Toward the end of her plan for alternative policies to reform education, while discussing the problem with privatizing schools, Ravitch sounds what I think is the most dire point confronting the U.S. and our commitment to democracy:

“The issue for the future is whether a small number of very wealthy entrepreneurs, corporations, and individuals will be able to purchase educational policy in this nation, either by funding candidates for local and state school boards, for state legislatures, for governor, and for Congress or by using foundation “gifts” to advance privatization of public education. (p. 310)

“And the problem is not “whether” this can occur, but that it is happening now.”

Many years ago, Deborah Meier and I used to be antagonists. She was a progressive and I was a conservative. But in 2004 or 2005, we started blogging together, exchanging posts each week in which we practiced “Bridging Differences.” She (and events) turned me around. I have often said, half in jest, that anyone who spends five years blogging with Debbie Meier will eventually be converted.

I was thrilled to receive Debbie’s wonderful review of the book. Her response means a great deal to me. I look up to her as a champion of children, a lover of education, and a true apostle of democracy.

Here is a sample:

Reign of Error lays out step by step the relentless thirty year drive to ether centralize the education of the young—on one hand—or divest it entirely into privatized hands on the other. Finally, the two sides have joined forces on a strategy that simultaneously does both. While this coalition has many old roots, in its current form it began with the fanfare around the publication of A Nation at Risk (1983). Ravitch was, at that time, a supporter of this bold statement that more or less accused America’s teachers and school boards of a plot to undermine American health and welfare onthe international scene….

And in the past few years Diane’s change of mind has been a particular blessing. She hasn’t, as her preset opponents claim, done a complete switch at all—she was always pro-union, pro-public education and always for standards. Fairly traditional ones. (In fact, her criticism of Progressive educators was that so many had abandoned all standards, she believed.)

Then lo and behold: no one has pulled it all together better than Diane—over and over again in the past few years she has led the challenge to the corporate reformers—right , center and left.. Her last two books Reign of Error and The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) pull it altogether…..

Thanks, Diane. We all need to keep this book handy so we can whip out the citations to make our case for the kind of reform America really needs, in your own words: “to prepare citizens with the minds, hearts and character to sustain our democracy into the future.”

G.F. Brandenburg is a retired math teacher who taught in the DC public schools for many years. He also has a star turn in “Reign of Error.” Here is his review
And here is part 2.

He writes:

“This book gratifies me because it lays out in a concise and organized manner much of what I and a number of other education bloggers have been trying to point out for the last four or five years. Ravitch’s clear prose is a masterful summary of the evidence that the bipartisan “reforms” being committed against public education are not only ineffective by the yardsticks held up by these ‘reformers’, but are also resegregating our schools and foisting an inferior education onto our poorest kids.”