Here’s a New Way to Judge Your State’s Schools
"The best schools in the world don't operate on vouchers and charters."
Last time I called Diane Ravitch, our country's leading education historian and one of the most vocal voices in education reform, she was on another call with the producers of The Daily Show. It was 2011, and The Daily Show was about to air a segment about the low salaries that teachers earn and Wisconsin's Republican Gov. Scott Walker's intentions to cut teachers pay and reduce workers' collective bargaining powers. The producers were calling to invite Ravitch to come on the show to talk to Jon Stewart about teachers and education reform.
At the time, reducing the power of teachers' unions, promoting charter schools, and using standardized test scores to weed out "bad teachers" and close "failing schools" had become the most popular silver bullets of the education reform movement. Michelle Rhee, the former chief of DC schools, had become the most prominentpublic face of these kinds of education reforms—ones that Ravitch was critiquing onThe Daily Show. Rhee had come out in support of Walker's policies.
In 2010, Newsweek published a cover story called "The Key to Saving American Education: We must fire bad teachers." That same year, on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Rhee announced that she was forming a national organization called Students First to promote her ideology among state policymakers. In 2013, Students First came out with "report cards" that graded each state's performance against the reform movement's education agenda. The report cards, like the policies Rhee and her allies pushed, received frequent—and fairly positive—media coverage.
When commentators and reporters needed a countervoice, Ravitch became the go-to progressive critic. She was not the only prominent academic who questioned the attacks on teachers, but she was the most vocal, thanks in part to her media savvy and punchy writing—and her 125,000 Twitter followers. In 2013, Ravitch and her allies launched the Network for Public Education, a nonprofit advocacy group that Here’s a New Way to Judge Your State’s Schools | Mother Jones:
