March 2010
2 posts
Schools are ALWAYS failing, so the myth goes →
Why do we presume that poor kids need a more rigid and authoritarian school climate than “ordinary” kids?
David Berliner and Bruce Biddle wrote a book on the topic: The Manufactured Crisis, in 1995. Richard Rothstein has continued the theme in most of his work, but rereading The Way We Were?, one realizes that public schools have always been driven by crises. Albert Shanker once acknowledged to...
Diane Ravitch's About-Face →
NCLB: She once supported it, but now says its requirements for testing in math and reading have squeezed vital subjects like history and art out of classrooms.
“Accountability, as written into federal law, was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools,” she writes. “The effort to upend American public education and replace it with something that was market-based began to feel too radical...