Educators and Students Have Privatizers on the Run, Says Ravitch
Diane Ravitch, former assistant secretary of education in President George H.W. Bush’s administration and NEA Friend of Education in 2010, has written a new book that she wants every public school educator to read.
In “Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools,” [Knopf: 2020] Ravitch explores how profit-minded billionaires like Sam Walton or Eli Broad—she calls them “disrupters,” never “reformers”—are behind large-scale efforts to squeeze public money out of public schools through a relentless focus on standardized test scores and failure. For many decades, it looked like they were winning. Not anymore. From West Virginia to Los Angeles, Ravitch’s book celebrates the growing rebellion of educators, parents and community members who are fighting for students and educators—and winning. Recently, she spoke with NEA Todayabout this work.
Let’s start with the title, “Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools.” Who here is Goliath?
Diane Ravitch: Goliath represents the people who have embarked on these really disastrous policies and funded them. You have to start with the government officials, and that means every president since George H.W. Bush, including Obama. They had this idea that you test and you test, and everybody will be proficient if you just test some more.
It really has changed little since Bush. Obama bought into it and [his Secretary of Education] Arne Duncan was an enthusiastic supporter. It’s been a bipartisan mess with Democrats equally implicated, including Rahm Emanuel in Chicago and Andrew Cuomo in New York. This has been the status quo for 20 years. They became infatuated with the notion that just measuring the problem will fix the problem. With this kind of thinking, the measure is the goal—when the goal really is a healthy, civic-minded, participatory citizenry.
You write in the introduction that you sat down to write this book at a pivotal time in public school history. What was going on, and how did it inform your approach to the book?
DR: I had no intention of writing this book. I write my daily blog and that’s very satisfying. But then the West Virginia walkout happened, and I kept reading about it with absolute fascination.
I had long been encouraging people, saying ‘we have to keep fighting,’ but I didn’t CONTINUE READING: Educators and Students Have Privatizers on the Run, Says Ravitch