My Unedited Review Of Diane Ravitch's Reign Of Error
The edited version of my review can be found at WHYY's NewsWorks New Jersey. Quotes from Diane Ravitch and Helen Gym were cut from my original for length.
Diane Ravitch's Reign of Error May Awaken the Sleeping Giant in the Education Reform Debate -- Public School Parents
It wasn’t long ago that I had never heard of Diane Ravitch.
I had kids in New Jersey public schools, a teacher husband, and even worked a brief stint in the for-profit education world as the Director of two different Sylvan Learning Centers in New York City, but my depth of knowledge about public education was embarrassingly shallow.
All that changed in 2010 when an application for a charter school was submitted in my small New Jersey town. At first I was dimly aware of what a charter school would mean to the schools my daughters would attend. But the more I learned, the more concerned I became.Then in April of 2011 I happened to catchWHYY’s Terry Gross interview Dr. Ravitch on Fresh Air.
And suddenly everything made sense.
She explained that charter schools had veered significantly from their original intent. She warned that charters had morphed into “an enormous entrepreneurial activity” and that charters no longer saw “themselves as collaborators with public schools but business competitors.”
This was exactly what was happening in my town. A charter was moving in and it seemed there was nothing we could do to stop it.
I reached out to Dr. Ravitch via social media for help and advice. With her encouragement, I rallied my entire community, and neighboring communities as well, and before I knew it we had defeated