Let It Reign!
The reformers can wait for Superman all they want. We’ve got Wonder Woman.
‘Reign Of Error: the Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools,’ released today, is what Arne Duncan would call a ‘game changer.’ This will bring a new and wider audience to Dr. Diane Ravitch’s analysis of the current fads in education which will, I expect, get her air time on mainstream television to spread the truth even further.
Education ‘reform,’ she describes in the first pages of the book is based on the narrative that our country’s schools are, in general, ‘failing’ and are in a wild free fall from the unspecified ‘glory days’ of public education. The situation, the reformers say, is so desperate, that the public has been convinced that it is, indeed, time to panic and to be willing to try radical and untested remedies. The problem with all this is that schools, though not perfect, are not truly ‘failing’ and the reckless strategies now called ‘reform’ are not making things any better and are, in many ways, making things worse.
The average reader will be shocked by chapters 5 through 9 in which Ravitch uses data to demonstrate that there is no international test score comparison crisis, high school graduation rates are at an all time high, and that NAEP test scores are also at an all time high. No, this does not mean that we don’t keep working to make schools better, but it does mean that the initial
