***Fitz
comment: This isn’t what you might
assume from the title! It is worth
reading, particularly for those of you who are highly educated and dedicated
teachers who ARE the experts in your field!!!! (All of you, right!)
***Diane
Ravitch, the author, is a very inspirational woman who is a
historian of education (she has a PhD in the history of education), and she
also serves as a Research Professor of Education at New York University. She
served under the son-of-Bush administration in education during the beginnings
of “No Child Left Behind”, but now totally denounces that initiative. Her blog is very interesting and can be
found at dianeravitch.net.
Peter
Greene, who teaches in Pennsylvania, read an interview in “USNews” in which
Arne Duncan claimed that our students fall behind those in other nations because we are “not
serious” about education.
Greene agrees with Arne that our country is
not serious about education.
If we took education seriously, he writes, teachers would
be highly respected and well paid.
“If we were serious about education, we would not allow
our public school system to be hijacked and dismantled by rich and powerful
amateurs.”
“If we were serious about education, our media would
direct its questions about education to teachers…”
“If we were serious about education, we would never
entrust our nation’s educational leadership to men who have no training or
experience in education at all and who only listened to other men with no
training or experience in education at all. If we were serious about education,
we would demand leadership by people who were also serious about education, and
we would demand leadership based on proven principles and techniques developed
by people who truly cared about the education of America’s students.”
“In short, Arne, if we were serious about education, we
would not have you and your cronies running the Department of Education and
popping up as “leaders” in the national discussion of education and more than
we would be asking Robin Williams and Justin Bieber to straighten out the war
in Afghanistan. If we were serious about education, we would send the whole
wave of privateers masquerading as reformers scuttling back to their hedge
funds and corporate tax havens….”
