Diane Ravitch: School privatization is a hoax, “reformers” aim to destroy public schools
Our public schools aren't in decline. And "reformers" with wild promises don't care about education — just profits
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Excerpted from "Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools"
As long as anyone can remember, critics have been saying that the schools are in decline. They used to be the best in the world, they say, but no longer. They used to have real standards, but no longer. They used to have discipline, but no longer. What the critics seldom acknowledge is that our schools have changed as our society has changed. Some who look longingly to a golden age in the past remember a time when the schools educated only a small fraction of the population.
But the students in the college-bound track of fifty years ago did not get the high quality of education that is now typical in public schools with Advanced Placement courses or International Baccalaureate programs or even in the regular courses offered in our top city and suburban schools. There are more remedial classes today, but there are also more public school students with special needs, more students who don’t read English, more students from troubled families, and fewer students dropping out. As for discipline, it bears remembering a 1955 film called “Blackboard Jungle,” about an unruly, violent inner-city school where students bullied other students. The students in this school were all white. Today, public schools are often the safest places for children in tough neighborhoods.
The claim that the public schools are in decline is not new. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Anti-intellectualism in American Life,” Richard Hofstadter characterized writing on education in