Rate this book

Reign Of Error: The Hoax Of The Privatization Movement And The Danger To America's Public Schools (2013)

by Diane Ravitch(Favorite Author)

4.18 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0385350880 (ISBN13: 9780385350884)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Knopf

review 1: Feels a bit re-hashed from other books; still, I can't really argue with it, except for Common Core, which I think is decent in conception, if not in execution. There are so many local ways to implement Common Core, and I wish that Ravitch didn't feel like it was inevitably tainted by privatization.As she says, though, everything else in school reform has been tainted by privitazation. It's hard to find people in "the movement" who don't hold incredibly offensive and wrongheaded ideas about public education, and Ravitch accurately lays out the effect of these ideas (in short, they hurt the most vulnerable kids).
review 2: Like Ravitch's previous and excellent book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2011), this book was a further eye opener... more, providing a mountain of evidence against the "school choice" corporate reform movement in education. Ravitch's intimate knowledge (she was a former Assistant Secretary of Education) and sweeping historical perspective of education in America is impressive and should be required reading for anyone in this country--educators, parents, students, taxpayers--concerned with the quiet, heavily-funded assault on public education that is happening under our very noses by wealthy corporate foundations, politicians, Wall Street hedge managers, and for-profit venture capitalists. It's incredibly sad and anger-provoking because the people who know the least about education are steering us wildly off course. Public education, the hallmark of our democratic ideals (just like public libraries) needs to be supported and defended by all of us, period. We need to hear the voice of teachers, who have been largely marginalized because of Bush's No Child Left Behind and, now, Obamas's Race to the Top. This book will cut through the fog, so to speak, and open your eyes to what's really happening in Congress and state legislatures, how campaign donations are helping states rewrite laws to allow both private and public charters (managed by private companies) to siphon away much-needed money from public education. It will literally make you sick, but you need to know what's happening in order to do something about it. less

Download links for: Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools

Advertising