Most of us still care about the wellbeing of all– now and in the future. Diane Ravitch’s Slaying Goliath is a book for us. If you count yourself as a member of that group read this book. Be prepared to be informed, angry, and incredulous, but most important, hopeful. The subtitle, The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools, alludes to what will move readers from despair to hope. And hope is what we need to turn away from helpless toward action; to reject selfishness and embrace unity; to forgo the passivity of as-best-as-we-can-expect and permit ourselves to imagine and then struggle for what is possible.
Ravitch’s first chapters, Disruption is Not Reform! and the Odious Status Quo, set the context for a thorough repudiation of the state of education in the United States: Endemic historic inequality made worse by decades of focused effort to disrupt a bedrock of American democracy, public education; Support for standardization linked to punishment of students, teachers, and schools by test scores; and, A determined effort to shift essential financial support from democratically governed public education to a competing private sector that includes privately governed charter schools and vouchers for private schools. The perpetrators call themselves reformers. Ravitch calls them disrupters. In her telling, that is a descriptive accusation, not a complement.
“No one likes the status quo,” she writes. “Disrupters claim to oppose the status quo, but they are the status quo. After all, they control the levers of power in federal and state governments. They write the laws and mandates. They define the status quo. They own it.” They are a somewhat disparate collective of market ideologues, self-regarding billionaires, technology titans, hedge fund managers, and entrepreneurs out to make (or steal) a fortune at the public trough. What unites them in an unwavering faith (ideas not supported by evidence) in the power of competition to drive human behavior.
Slaying Goliath upends the myths of declining achievement and the lies that teachers unions and incompetent teachers are responsible for poor children’s failure to rise to their potential (or do well on standardized tests. Instead, Ravitch centers blame where it belongs, on our systemic failure to address the systemic- and personally debilitating effects of poverty.
I am education news and policy junkie. I am, I think, well informed. I have been writing about the assault on public education for over a decade. Nonetheless, I found myself stunned by Diane’s explicit chronicles of the sheer depth, power, and magnitude of the disruption effort. Outside of a limited circle of education policy followers, I don’t think the American public is cognizant of the extent to which the disrupters have gone to bring their privatization effort into being. For that reason alone, I hope Slaying Goliath gets widespread attention. When I cracked open the book, I had no illusion that the giant names of eduction disruption- Gates, Broad, Walton, Koch, Zuckerberg, Sackler, Bezos, Hastings, Bloomberg– to name a few, care deeply about equity in education or its enabling cousin, segregation. However, I was still flabbergasted by the sheer extent of their efforts, from spending millions in local school board elections to directly funding federal policy.
Ravitch asks, “What do Disrupters Want?” Spoiler Alert. It is not education for broad democratic participation. It is not even high-quality education for every child. It is not a nation of critical thinkers. For many it is venal and limiting: Squash unions with the reach to defend the needs of working people; Provide arenas for unrestrained profit taking; and, Extend their political and economic dominance. The book makes clear that concerns about the divisive and debilitating impacts of racial and sociological isolation are not just collateral damage, they are the enabling conditions for advancing a vision of education in the United States that the public rejects. The strict behavioral standards of disrupter-favored charter schools are about teaching compliance, securing the promotional effect of artificially raising test scores, and weeding out the perceived less-deserving students.
If you think truth and the evidence that supports it still matter, read Slaying Goliath. It provides plenty of material for argumentation. If you, like many Americans, find some logic in high-stakes testing, school choice, and merit pay for teachers read this book. If you are open, it will cause you to think. Everyone will be appalled by the unbelievable level of fraud, corruption, lying, and refusal to look at evidence that has enabled the continuation of the charter school and testing industries and the failure of government to control it.
However, more than anything Slaying Goliath is about hope. Ravitch chronicles and honors the courage and persistence of the resistance– the parents and teachers who pushed back against turning classrooms into stultifying, soul crushing test preparation mills and who resisted the imposition of creativity-killing, developmentally inappropriate standards; the unionless teachers who risked their jobs not just for well-deserved pay raises and health benefits, but more resources for children.
Slaying Goliath is not naïve. The biblical Goliath was, after all, a behemoth. Ravitch details the rising opposition. It is exhilarating to read. Nevertheless, with their unimaginable wealth, the giants of education disruption remain powerful and persistent in pursuit of their real goals, control and profit. However, Ravitch provides us with what David lacked. Strength in numbers and unity. The mask, she tells us, is falling away. At the truth comes out, and groups of teachers, parents, and even students score even small victories, “Goliath stumbles.”
Ravitch makes crystal clear that the bipartisan embrace of so-called education reform was a paid for masquerade, a combination of ideological blinders, the arrogance of privilege, and avarice. The fight is not over, by any means. However, the tide is turning, pulled by the gravitational force of unified principled resistance.
Arthur H. Camins is a lifelong educator. He writes about education and social justice. He works part-time with curriculum developers at UC Berkeley as an assessment specialist. He retired recently as Director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at Stevens Institute of Technology. He has taught and been an administrator in New York City, Massachusetts, and Louisville, Kentucky. The ideas expressed in this article are his alone.