Retired Youngstown Professor Launches Website to Expose Horrors of Ohio School “Reform”
This blog will take a three-week, late summer break after today. Look for a new post on Monday, September 8. Enjoy the rest of your summer!
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Randy Hoover is a recently retired professor of education at Youngstown State University, right here in rust-belt Ohio, where he has learned from experience about the challenges facing teachers in an economically distressed urban area. Diane Ravitch recently posted Hoover’s introduction to a new website he is launching to expose the misconceptions, fallacies, and lies of today’s school “reform” movement.
Hoover’s description of the experiences of his former students—now teachers—perfectly depicts what teachers here in Cleveland tell me: “With every new semester, my students expressed greater concern and more confusion about what was happening to them. They wanted to know why their professional worlds were being so drastically altered for the worse, why they were being singled out as a profession for demonization and ridicule by the media, the public, and both major political parties. Indeed, some of my students were even beginning to believe the rhetoric of reform. Sadly, the only explanations they had were the fragmented, shallow propaganda slogans the reformists were peddling in the media…. There was simply no reflective critique, no voices challenging No Child Left Behind and the cascading, anti-teacher, anti-public school mandates gushing from the Ohio legislature and the Ohio Department of Education that were inundating them.”
Hoover captures both the irony and tragedy of how standardized testing and the rating of school districts is playing out in metropolitan areas across the United States these days: “For my students working in high-poverty schools, the isolation and alienation was palpable, with very good, dedicated teachers feeling demoralized and abandoned amid the very public, state-mandated accountability reports showing them to be professionally incompetent. Equally disturbing were those in the wealthier schools who were starting to become a bit smug because these same accountability reports portrayed them to be professionally excellent. Neither group understood that teachers in low-performing schools were no more the cause Retired Youngstown Professor Launches Website to Expose Horrors of Ohio School “Reform” | janresseger: