There's a line I love in Miss Congeniality 2 (I know, not exactly highbrow cinema, but we can't be serious ALL the time!). Sandra Bullock gets in a fight with Regina King and calls her "sister." Regina says, "You didn't just call me sister. I don't recall seeing a skinny, white-ass girl growing up at the table." and Sandra responds, "First of all... thank you for calling me skinny."
So I'm going to start my response to this review of TEACHED Vol. I: "TEACHED Documentaries Offer Glossy Propaganda" with: Thank you for calling me glossy!
Posts tagged #Diane Ravitch
I'm not Finnish'ed Yet
I think we need a service that helps the public read between the lines of education-related articles (and highlights the incredible jumps in logic that appear so frequently). Maybe Google can develop a new "translation" app: you could just paste in any article, hit send, and a new version would appear with what the writer is REALLY saying. Red flashing lights would reveal statements that contradict each other (or reality), and links would magically appear to take you to what the research actually says.
THE RAVITCH FACTOR
Diane Ravitch, a well-known education historian and analyst, is getting more attention now than ever before, since pulling a "180" on almost everything she used to stand for.
I had the pleasure of working with Diane in the late 1990's (together we wrote "Fulfilling the Promise of Head Start" for one), and it is an understatement to say I am now gravely disappointed. It appears that Diane has given up on the low-income, minority kids and families she wanted to change the world for, and jumped on a bandwagon where she can enjoy unfettered attention and popularity by people who want to keep our education system just as it is: a place where teachers aren't held accountable for working hard, where unions (but not teachers) enjoy a truly incomparable amount of power (and blithely abuse it), and where massive segments of the population are stuck in schools that treat them like second-class citizens.