Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools

NYU education professor Ravitch (Reign of Error) argues that corporate-driven school reform efforts have failed in this fiery takedown of the movement’s “strategies of high-stakes testing, standardization, and privatization.” According to Ravitch, “Corporate Disruptors” including New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have met their match in a grassroots resistance that has “facts” on its side. Ravitch, who once supported the No Child Left Behind Act, claims that since its passage in 2001, “school choice” reforms have funneled money away from public schools without raising test scores or closing the achievement gap between white and black students. She cites evidence that charter schools increase segregation, criticizes the “bizarre” notions behind Common Core standards, and argues that evaluating teachers based on student tests scores is “nonsensical.” Among those fighting the “philanthrocapitalists,” Ravitch identifies a Rhode Island student group that protested a state plan to require high school seniors to pass a standardized test in order to graduate (the plan was scrapped when failure rates proved too high). Vituperative and somewhat repetitive, Ravitch’s polemic nevertheless succeeds in making the case that “the root cause of poor performance in school is not ‘bad schools’ or ‘bad teachers’ but poverty.” Public school advocates will take heart in Ravitch’s assessment that they’ve turned the tide against privatization. (Jan.)