Check Out Talking Points Memo Series of Short Articles by Diane Ravitch
Last week the education historian Diane Ravitch was featured in a five-part “Book Club” atTalking Points Memo. In the series of very short articles—here, here, here, here, and here—Ravitch shares a taste of her recent book, Reign of Error. If you haven’t had an opportunity to begin reading Ravitch’s now book, here is a good opportunity to take a look at some of the content.
The first piece, taken from the book’s first chapter, summarizes Ravitch’s critique of where our current, bipartisan conventional wisdom on school reform has gone badly wrong.
The second and third articles are Ravitch’s analysis of Michelle Rhee’s tenure as chancellor of the Washington, D.C. Public Schools.
In the fourth piece Ravitch traces the impact of test-and-punish school reform from George Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act to Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program: “The upshot of these two programs, which both rely heavily on standardized testing, is the massive demoralization of educators; an exodus of experienced educators, who are replaced in many districts by young, inexperienced, low-wage teachers; the closure of scores or hundreds of public schools; the opening of thousands of privately managed charters; the growth of for-profit charter schools and online charter schools; a widespread attack on teachers’ due process rights and collective bargaining rights; the near-collapse of public education in urban districts like Detroit and Philadelphia, as public schools are replaced by privately managed charter schools; a burgeoning educational-industrial complex of testing corporations and technology