Thursday, January 23, 2014

Peter Greene: "Why I Agree With Arne Duncan" by Diane Ravitch

***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….”