Wednesday, April 11, 2012

From Diane Ravitch: Stunning statistics and a plea for investing in teachers - News Blog - Rochester City Newspaper

From Diane Ravitch: Stunning statistics and a plea for investing in teachers - News Blog - Rochester City Newspaper:


From Diane Ravitch: Stunning statistics and a plea for investing in teachers

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I don't always agree with Diane Ravitch, one of the heroes of the anti-testing, anti-charter education activists, but her article in the March 22 New York Review of Books has a ton of wise reminders about the reality of urban education - and the challenges.
Ravitch cites a speech by Duke University's Helen Ladd, "in which she demonstrated that poverty drags down academic performance, not only in the US, but in other nations as well."
"To argue, as so many of the corporate reformers blithely do, that poverty is used as ‘an excuse' for bad teachers is either na�ve or ignorant," Ravitch writes. "Or it may be a way of avoiding the politically difficult subjects of poverty and income inequality,