America's Education Whistleblower: Diane Ravitch and the Reign of Error

[ancianita]

2. Please don't buy her book. She's stating what's been obvious to teachers for over fifteen years.

Last edited Wed Sep 25, 2013, 10:39 AM - Edit history (1)

You're not going to like this, but I feel compelled to really go off here. And seriously, it's not about you, even one bit.

It's about the role of academia in "fixing" public schools. Diane Ravitch 'did not sit behind a screen to offer her insider testimony on these issues to the court of public opinion" because she has to go out and promote a book. A big fat confessional about how she helped make these schools a failure throughout her career.

For the forty years that I've read everything she's written or heard her name since my student days at Florida State and Northwestern, I'll tell you this: This woman has been a professional opportunist who publishes which side she's on only when it's safe and teachers have lost their ground game. She's never done legal battle or said or done anything risky for teachers, she's never fought against state or district boards to stop their adopting any "reform" or defunding moves on the treadmill of "innovation" that masquerades as reform and just earns middleman 'paychecking.'

She collates raw data after all the arguments have been aired. She is ten years behind the issues here and does not deserve "expert" stature in the court of public opinion about the public's schools. She in no way deserves publication as some "expert," but gets published due to the sheer momentum of her academic life. She should just go away. She's a waste of time. Only many younguns at salon or other sites on the internets don't know that.

If you're in academia, I can see that you'd probably have some need to defend her. I'm not. I'm in the very different world of public education, the world of field professionals. I don't have an axe to grind, except that universities -- the world of which Ravitch is a part -- are in no way invested any longer in developing excellence in public schools. They have become as 'marketized' in their goals as their corporate endowers, to whom Ravitch has been tied her entire career.

She is not a friend. Friends like her simply confuse who the enemies of public education really are. She knows. She drains professional expertise and stature away from teachers, whom academics should politically aid and stand behind when the public's teaching professionals say they need it, not years and years after they've ignored them and their state fights lost. All the while these kinds of academics busy themselves with higher education games -- such as conducting what I call treadmills of innovation in public schools, but never in private schools. Why not private schools? Because they already know what works. And they know that politicians wouldn't spend that kind of money even if the public wanted them to.

As a 35-year field professional, I can tell you that academics like Diane Ravitch do not, do NOT care who wins the public education war, as long as they get paid. Sure, they continually sell their lip service as 'expertise,' but they, in fact, do nothing that affects public school classroom improvements. They don't change state or local board policies. This war is about tax money and political spending. She's got hers.

Academia has provided no lasting commitment to public education. It has abandoned democratic education values for corporate values. Ravitch does no harm, but education is sooo past what she's offering, which will in no way turn the tide to increase funding. She's never changed the general public's opinion about school over the years, yet she's added nothing but weight and over-complexity to the very real problems of funding. I believed it of her twenty years ago, and I still belive it: Ravitch is the last in a long line of sellouts to the public in the name of "expert" opinion. Forget her.