Diane Ravitch Speaks About Education

This Diane Ravitch lecture is rather long and dry (like Diane Ravitch's excellent and comprehensive book, The Life and Death of the Great American School System, which I summarize here) but she summarily refutes the claims of Governor Christie's favorite documentary, Waiting for Superman, and she exposes some of the myths behind data based teacher evaluations, charter schools, No Child Left Behind, unions, market-driven school reform, and tenure . . . I highly recommend the book, but if you don't care enough about our nation's educational system to read an entire book-- which I completely understand, because it's almost Black Friday and you probably need to start reading the circulars-- then you can use this clip (she starts speaking ten minutes in) as a guide, albeit an ersatz one.

3 comments:

zman said...

"Market driven school reform"? How does that work?

Dave said...

students select from a number of charter schools-- they essentially become consumers assessing products, and the lesser schools close. the problem is in the transitions-- we can do without oranges for a bit if they get expensive, and wait for the market to respond, but with students, you lose them while they are waiting. it's also about bringing in non-educator administration that looks at data and money more than curriculum and actual teachers. it's nuts.

Anonymous said...

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