Truth, Anger and the National Conversation about Ed Reform
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
There's been a lotta snark goin' on in Ed Policy World lately. Most of it centered on The Book--Diane Ravitch's Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools. I've read the book (making hundreds of little asterisks, corner-folds, full-paragraph highlights and margin notes) and have written a review, which I'll post on the day the book is released, Tuesday.
It must be the urge to get out there first and capture the spotlight that's caused so many reviewers to post real and imaginary appraisals already. What's interesting to me--as a lifelong, pedestrian school teacher, toiling at what Checker Finn calls the "retail level"--is how everyone is trying to position themselves as Skeptic. There are friendly skeptics, if-only-she-weren't-so-one-sided skeptics, yes-but skeptics. There's a whole spectrum, right down to those who are practically foaming at the mouth over the case that Ravitch lays out in her book: DFER's Joe Williams and The New York Post. Several of these people refer to Diane as their "friend" or "mentor," ironically.
I am guessing that on Tuesday there will be an outpouring of positive reviews (spoiler: mine), but right now, the conversation is focused on a kind of general unwillingness to say: this book calls it as Ravitch sees it, and there are a lot of practitioners who increasingly believe she sees it as it is.
If I had read Ravitch's book five years ago, I may have thought it harsh. When you're going off to school every day, critiques of education policy take a backseat to lesson plans, and what's coming downstream from administrators and the school board. But the mass of evidence