Diane Ravitch's new book

Diane Ravitch has written a new book: The Death and Life of the Great American School System. She believes in teaching content, not just focusing on the style of teaching and encouraging student freedom (this has caused her to be labeled illiberal or conservative by education academics in the past), and she used to think that testing and charter schools were a good way to achieve these goals. Therefore, she supported the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. Now she’s against NCLB and related, recent developments because charter schools are proven to be unsuccessful, insufficiently accountable or unaccountable, and likely to be taken over by corporate interests; and testing has generated fraud – state-specific standards for tests and state-administered tests have generated evidence of students’ test scores rising under NCLB, but national tests have not shown evidence of improvement under NCLB. Rather, national tests have shown that greater improvement in student achievement was happening before NCLB was put in place. Also, there has been an unconstructive focus, in Ravitch’s view, on demonizing teacher unions and finding “who to punish” (which schools to shut down, how many schools to shut down, which teachers and administrators to fire, etc.); and there has been insufficient emphasis on areas other than the "basic skills" of reading and math. We need to focus attention also on science, the arts, and the humanities including literature. Ravitch also observes with disapproval that hugely wealthy foundations like the Gates (Microsoft) and Waltons' (Wal-Mart) foundations are highly influential in directing education policy; these foundations support charter schools, the privatization of education, and the current emphasis on skills testing.

I believe that a solution must include greater respect for, and influence of, the leadership of teachers and the teaching profession in decision-making; and higher-quality and well-paid teaching in currently underfunded school districts. The corporate sphere and corporation-spawned foundations have too much influence in education. Needed change cannot happen unless educators increasingly regard themselves, and conduct themselves, as grown-up human beings and competent professionals, departing from habits of embracing ultimately disempowering roles of helpless-infantile-victims-who-must-be-rescued-by-someone-else. Emotional investment in childish, fairy-tale rescue narratives in which educators consciously or subconsciously fancy themselves as princesses-waiting-for-the-rescuing-hero, and the self-disempowerment and self-infantilization that are involved in such an emotional orientation, are bad for education. Nobody else is going to swoop in and solve all our problems (especially not people from the corporate sphere). We educators, ourselves, are the ones we have been waiting for.

Joseph Stiglitz

I’m interested in the ideas of Columbia economist Joseph Stiglitz, author of the new book, Freefall. He criticizes the US for not regulating investment practices enough, not investing enough in medium and small business, not investing in big businesses (the ones that failed) in a way that secured a sufficient return for the government (European nations did better with this), and not rearranging work in tough economic times in ways that would hurt people less (Germany and France, much more than the US, did things like shifting people from full-time to part-time work but not taking away their jobs). He thinks the World Bank and the IMF lately are operating in ways that are less destructive of small countries than formerly (formerly they lent to countries in need in ways that set too-stringent conditions and brought about recessions and depressions in small countries; lately they are not doing this and are sometimes doing constructive things). He says the US dollar should not remain the economic standard for the world (with our recent bailouts and stimulus-es we are becoming a less reliable-looking currency backer, I believe), and that some international monetary standard likely should replace it. He says we should have done a bigger initial stimulus and we would have stimulated more job creation if we had, and he thinks we’re likely to have another recession like the 2008 one within the next 10 years because we didn’t handle the last one well enough. He says banking and investing need to be separated institutionally, and regulations should be such that no company ever becomes “too big to fail” (especially not investment companies, I think; some insurance for banks is needed). He says we need to stop having a situation where there is “underwater” investment (like a mortgaged house where an individual owes more on the house than the house is worth), and that a kind of bankruptcy/forgiveness of debt should be legally provided as an “out.” He points out that there has been irresponsible management of capital by a range of people at the top of the $income pyramid to cause more capital from the $bottom to make its way to the top (e.g., predatory lenders who lend at exorbitant rates in sneaky ways; credit card companies who engage in similar practices; etc.).

As it appears to me, what is economically rational is also empathic and moves away from a silly, compulsive, inhumane, and exclusive emphasis on competition and winning over econmic activity that is humane, interestingly diversifying, sustainably empowering, nonviolent, secure, and valuably productive.