Open Letters To ‘B-List’ Reformers I Know. Part 3: Michael Petrilli
With social media, I suppose I can say that I ‘know’ someone if we’ve sent tweets to each other over the years. This is the case with Michael Petrilli. He is executive vice president of The Fordham Institute, and, according to his bio on their site, he is “one of the nation’s most trusted education analysts.”
I have been intrigued by ‘reform-minded’ Petrilli who, along with Rick Hess, occasionally writes something that admits the complexity of trying to improve education in this country. Most ‘reformers,’ particularly ones who are getting rich off of it, present such a caricature about what public schools and average teachers are supposedly doing and what charter schools and ‘highly effective’ teachers are supposedly doing. Petrilli, especially recently, has come out against some big ‘reform’ sacred cows. The most popular of these was a post called ‘College isn’t for everyone. Let’s stop pretending it is.‘ This caused Rishawn Biddle at Dropout Nation to write an article called ‘Mike Petrilli Gives Up On Reform.’
I ‘engaged’ with Petrilli on Twitter about his ‘College isn’t for everyone’ piece, and he wrote some things that would surely frustrate Biddle even more.
But despite Petrilli’s willingness to admit that improving education dramatically isn’t just about firing teachers and closing schools, Petrilli seems to have emerged as one of the Open Letters To ‘B-List’ Reformers I Know. Part 3: Michael Petrilli | Gary Rubinstein's Blog: