Into the Fray
Diane Ravitch
Sometimes people make it too easy to respond when they attack my opinions or those of others. This happened last week with Jonathan Alter’s diatribe about Diane Ravitch’s comments regarding tests and test results in herOp Ed piece published last Sunday in the New York Times. I have been reading the responses to Alter’s attack and the blog posts, from the eloquence of Jim Horn’s piece in Schools Matter, to the matter-of-fact post by Douglas Massey and Leonie Hamison’s post with the facts and a challenge to Alter and others. Well, just for the fun of it, I decided to throw in my two cents. Mr. Alter needs to understand that there are a lot of people who know a heck of a lot more about education than he or the other pundits do who take on the subject of education without educating themselves to the reality that is facing our students today.
What I have learned as I started to speak up two years ago about what was happening in Seattle and around the