Diane Ravitch Takes Critics of Public Education to Task over Education Reform
Posted on 28 January 2011
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(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Diane Ravitch, right, signs a copy of her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, for School of Education graduate student Shahrzad Daneshvar.
With two years of service in the Teach for America program under her belt, Shahrzad Daneshvar settled into her seat in the University of Miami’s Storer Auditorium, anxious to hear what one of the nation’s top educational analysts and historians had to say about what is being done in the name of school reform.
For Daneshvar, a UM graduate student in the School of Education’s Community and Social Change Program, what she heard couldn’t have been more clear, direct, and unmistakable: Poor academic performance in the nation’s public schools is not a result of bad teachers but poverty, and to evaluate teacher effectiveness based on the test scores of their students will not help improve ailing school systems, but only