Marginalizing the Teaching Profession: Merrow, Ravitch and Education Nation,
Yesterday, Diane Ravitch's masterful book, Reign of Error, debuted at #10 on the New York Times best seller list. At the same time this news was coming out, John Merrow posted a blog entitled "Do We Need More Heroes?" in which he compares her to right-wing Republican Ted Cruz, associates her with the left, and accuses her followers of being intolerant zealots.
As of this morning, more than 120 people have posted comments on Merrow's blog, ranging from critical to brutal. One or two have agreed with him. I responded yesterday myself to Merrow, but this part of a bigger pattern.
We have, in our nation, two parallel conversations going on about education, and when those two conversations intersect, there is tremendous friction. With his attack on Ravitch and her followers yesterday, Merrow created such a friction point.
The reason there is such energy there is that the funders of corporate reform are making a great effort to pretend that those of us who profoundly disagree with their approach are some kind of fringe element, leftovers from a bygone era, soon to be in the dustbin of history. Merrow's blog was in service of this, but because it is a blog, one of the few avenues of media that is open to visible public response, it has yielded the opposite result.
While Merrow claims that Ravitch is a leftist who is out of the mainstream, both the volume and substance of the comments reveal that she is squarely in the middle of a tremendous
