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
Steve Brill’s blinkered view of education
- 08-25-2011
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Blog by Felix Salmon/Reuters
If you don’t have the time or inclination to read Steve Brill’s book on education reform, then his bombastic op-ed on the subject is a pretty good alternative. And similarly, if you didn’t read Diane Ravitch’s 4,400-word review of “Waiting for Superman” in the NYRB, then her 1,000-word response to Brill captures the heart of her argument. Reading them side by side, the conclusion I come to is that Brill protests far too much. Brill’s running theme is that there are discoverable facts about education, and that when a crack reporter (Brill himself, natch) spends lots of time poring through arbitration-hearing testimony and union contracts and the like, those facts will become clear and can be reported in a straightforward manner. It’s the “trust me, I’m a reporter” approach. Meanwhile, Ravitch stays out of the weeds, reporting instead the result of large-scale empirical studies which show that charter schools don’t in fact outperform unionized public schools, and that US educational underperformance is much more attributable to child poverty than it is to bad or unionized teachers. (more...)
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