History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
Meritocracy myth v. the advantages of privilege (A tale of hubris)
- 04-07-2011
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Blog by Paul Thomas/Daily Censored
In January 2010, I emailed Diane Ravitch after viewing a video of one of her talks preceding the release of her now often mentioned book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, that signaled some significant changes in her views on education and education reform. My email was an apology. I confessed to Diane that I had been a Ravitch detractor for much of my career, based primarily on my view that she was an essentialist who promoted a narrow view of literacy–specifically that students must be raised on the Great Books*. But the Diane Ravitch I heard in the video and eventually read in the new book (and her subsequent prolific life as a public intellectual and frequent voice on twitter) was the personification of the academic, the scholar, the expert that I admire because she was very publicly stepping back from her ideology and reforming her views based on evidence despite the need to change her mind. (more...)
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