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

I started to write this book in the spring of 2018 at an unusual moment in our nations history. In state after state, tens of thousands of teachers walked out of their schools and marched to their state capitols to protest low pay, poor working conditions, and the persistent underfunding of public education. The walkouts and strikes continued into 2019, spreading from district to district and state to state. Teachers were marching not just for themselves but for the students they taught, who were in overcrowded classes, using obsolete textbooks, in long-neglected buildings. In the Republican-dominated states where the walkouts began, education spending had been sharply reduced in the previous decade. Faced with thousands of irate teachers and closed schools, legislators made concessions to placate the striking teachers, even in states where unions were weak and strikes were forbidden.

Most commentators were shocked by teacher militancy. They never imagined that teachers would rise up spontaneously, but they did. Across the nation, teachers were demoralized by stagnant wages, budget cuts, soaring health care costs, crowded classrooms, punitive evaluation systems, attacks on teachers job security and pensions, and public funding of privately managed schools, which reduced the funding of public schools. Many teachers decided they could no longer remain in their chosen profession because a draconian standards-and-testing regime mandated by federal law stole weeks, sometimes months, from classroom instruction, distorted the goals of education, and made it impossible for them to teach with autonomy, passion, and creativity.

Persistent insults and legislative attacks on the teaching profession and public schools caused many experienced teachers to abandon their classrooms long before they were due to retire, creating teacher shortages and causing a sharp drop in the number of applicants to teacher preparation institutions. At a time when fake Reformers were casting teachers as villains, the number of people entering the profession went into free fall. How can a nation educate its young without well-qualified, experienced teachers?

The teacher walkouts were a nail in the coffin of what has falsely been called education reform for at least two decades. By the bold act of walking out in mass numbers and marching to their state capitols, even where doing so was forbidden by law, teachers were educating the public about the mean-spiritedness, ignorance, and shortsightedness behind the facade of education reform. Teachers were working second and third jobs to make ends meet. Some teachers were paid so little that they were eligible for government food stamps. Even with their low wages, teachers laid out or raised hundreds of dollars each year to buy essential school supplies for their students. These conditions, graphically illustrated in newspapers, magazines, and on websites, educated the public about the causes of widespread teacher shortages and the dramatic underfunding of public schools.

This was the wreckage that the so-called reform movement had created by demonizing teachers as if they were adversaries of their students and treating them as malingerers who required constant evaluation lest they fail to do their duty. This was the damage inflicted on public schools, their students and teachers, by heedless billionaires who had decided to disrupt, reinvent, and redesign the nations public schools. This was the work of some of the richest people in the nation: the Walton family, Bill Gates, Betsy DeVos, the Koch brothers, Michael Bloomberg, Laurene Powell Jobs, Reed Hastings, Eli Broad, and a bevy of other billionaires, most of whom had made their fortunes on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, or in the tech industry.

For nearly two decades, the reformers had promised a dramatic transformation in American education, based on their strategy of high-stakes testing, teacher evaluation by test scores, charter schools, and closing low-scoring public schools. They confidently claimed that they knew the answers to all the vexing problems in education. They asserted that they were leading the civil rights movement of our time, funded by billionaires, Wall Street titans, and the federal government, as if the elites would be leading a civil rights movement against the powerful (themselves!). They insisted that when their remedies were imposed, Americas test scores would soar to the top of international rankings. No longer would poor children be trapped in failing schools. No more would childrens success be determined by their ZIP code or social status. They all sang from a common hymnal about the failures of public education and proclaimed their certainty that they knew how to turn failure into high test scores for all.