from In These Times:
It’s the Poverty, Stupid
The education reform debate is misdirected.By Roger Bybee
With America’s public schools struggling to survive slashed budgets and unequal funding, school reform is back on the national agenda—but will the new model of market-based “reform” promote greater educational quality?
Already, schools in low-income areas see abysmally low achievement levels. In many cities, less than half of students graduate from high school.
To combat the crisis of low achievement, the Obama administration, led by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, cobbled together a group of political and corporate powerbrokers, including Bill Gates, to spearhead education reform. Their efforts have been vigorously applauded by major media from the New York Times to the Washington Post to Newsweek.
In her recent book
The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Undermine Education, Diane Ravitch, education historian and former assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush, takes the education reform establishment to task.
Ravitch blasts what she calls the “Billionaire Boys Club” vision of public education. “Three foundations—Gates, Broad and Walton—are now committed to charter schools and to evaluating teachers by test scores,” she told Democracy Now in March. And that’s now the policy of the Department of Education. “We have never seen anything like this, where foundations had the ambition to direct national educational policy, and in fact are succeeding,” says Ravitch. .............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6326/its_the_poverty_stupid
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