By John Thompson. Part Two of two. Diane Ravitch’s Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools is the history of the rise and fall of test-driven, competition-driven school reform. As in her two previous, ground-breaking books, Ravitch changes the …
By John Thompson. Part One of Two. Diane Ravitch’s Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools is the history of the rise and fall of corporate school reform, but it is much more. It isn’t that surprising that a scholar like Ravitch, like so many …
By Anthony Cody. As reported on Diane Ravitch’s blog, the Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress are offering a prize for proposals for a “Moonshot for Kids.” Here is what they want: By August 1, 2019, submit a brief application through our online portal. We are seeking ideas …
By Anthony Cody. We think of historians as observers after the fact. They pore over the ephemeral and permanent records of past times and, from that evidence, construct stories that help us understand, and see the larger patterns at work. Diane Ravitch is a historian working in the now. She has an understanding of …
By John Thompson. As the Network for Public Education documents a billion dollars wasted on failed charter schools, the national news is full of the latest charter financial scandals stretching from New Jersey to California. We can’t forget, however, that virtual charters, like Oklahoma’s Epic for-profit …
By Anthony Cody. Across the nation, educators have awakened to the reality that charter schools are a threat to the health and even survival of public schools. For that reason, charters have become a major point of contention in teacher strikes, from Oakland to Los Angeles, and even in West Virginia. But at …
By John Thompson. Part One of Two. Read Part Two here. The theme of the Network for Public Education’s fifth annual conference was that corporate reformers have lost the “David versus Goliath” battle over public education. We public school supporters have defeated the privatization campaign known as …
By Paul Horton. Because I have been asked to comment on problems facing public schools in the United States, I would like to begin by saying that there are a great many things right with public education. Two friends, Ellen Allensworth, Director of the UChicago Consortium on School Research, and Chris Lubienski, …
By John Thompson. David Callahan’s The Givers begins with the first politicized think tanks of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the American Enterprise Institute. Callahan may be right and the AEI may have been one of the more intellectually honest of the conservative alternatives to academic research, but still it …
By John Thompson. I wish I didn’t have to write a positive review of Alex Molnar’s “Dismantling Public Education: Turning Ideology into Gold.” But, as Molnar explains, the toxic effect of neoliberal, market-driven school reform provides an exceptionally clear example of privatization’s …
