Neoliberalism: The Ideology That Dares Not Speak Its Name

[TeacherinExile]

(01-02-2017, 09:09 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(01-02-2017, 08:00 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

Actually, all of those are false except for the first one as it pertains to discipline problems, which public schools can also throw out.

Actually, as a retired school teacher myself and reader of several of her excellent books, Diane Ravitch is one of the foremost authorities on the detrimental effects of school reform.  She has credibility with me because she has done an about-face on federal laws, such as No Child Left Behind, as well as her views on school choice (i.e., voucher programs and charter schools).  She has written two excellent and well-researched books (The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Undermine Education (2010) and Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools (2013).  I should mention, too, that she was appointed to top education posts under both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, so she is not partisan or ideological in the least.  I like that.

The following is excerpted from the Wikipedia entry about her:

While she originally supported No Child Left Behind and charter schools, Ravitch later became "disillusioned," and wrote, "I no longer believe that either approach will produce the quantum improvement in American education that we all hope for." On her blog, she often cited low-performing charters, frauds, corruption, incompetent charter operators, exclusionary policies practiced by charters, and other poor results that diverted funding from public schools into private hands. High-stakes testing, "utopian" goals, "draconian" penalties, school closings, privatization, and charter schools didn't work, she concluded. "The best predictor of low academic performance is poverty—not bad teachers."[14]

Ravitch said that the charter school and testing reform movement was started by billionaires and "right wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation," for the purpose of destroying public education and teachers' unions.[15] She reviewed the documentary Waiting for Superman, directed by Davis Guggenheim, as "propagandistic" (pro-charter schools and anti-public schools), studded with "myths" and at least one "flatly wrong" claim.[16] Of Education Secretary Arne Duncan's Race to the Top program, Ravitch said in a 2011 interview it "is an extension of No Child Left Behind ...[,] all bad ideas." She concluded "We are destroying our education system, blowing it up by these stupid policies. And handing the schools in low-income neighborhoods over to private entrepreneurs does not, in itself, improve them. There's plenty of evidence by now that the kids in those schools do no better, and it's simply a way of avoiding their - the public responsibility to provide good education."[17]

I tend to listen closer to people whose views have evolved in light of new evidence.  In fact, one of my favorite quotes attributed to John Maynard Keynes was his rejoinder to a critic who accused him of being inconsistent: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

I know that my governing philosophy has evolved over time.  Indeed, I am leery of people who have never budged on theirs or, worse in a way, politicians who shift on the issues out of political expediency.