Education expert Diane Ravitch is right to be disappointed in Rhode Island’s best known former public school student Viola Davis.
Both RI Future and Ravitch both wrote about parent trigger laws this morning, ALEC model legislation that allows parents to privatize public schools – here’s Ravitch’s piece and here’s Russ Conway’s. Ravitch notes that RI’s own Viola Davis, famous around the country for almost winning an Oscar and famous here in Rhode Island for growing up in Central Falls, will star in a new propaganda film about parent trigger laws.
Here’s what Ravitch writes about Davis:
It’s sad to see Viola Davis involved in this sneaky push for privatization. I remember when she won the Academy Award in 2010 and announced that she was proud to be a graduate of Central Falls High School, right at the time that all the corporate reformers were gloating about the threat to shut it down.
It should come as little surprise though that DAvis is shilling for the corporate education model … earlier this month even more famous Hollywood actor Meryl Streep, who beat out Davis for the Best Actress Academy Award, recent gave a grand total of $15,000 to the Segue charter school in the runner-ups hometown of Central Falls. According to the Projo, Davis “had introduced Streep to Segue and mentioned that the school was in dire need of a new building.”
It’s disturbing how the left is swooned by Ravitch’s opinion on public schools when she’s never taught a day in a public school in her life. Wasn’t that the line the left used to beat up Gist…lacking experience in public schools? Yet the self proclaimed educational historian and flip flopper Ravitch gets a pass. If you read her blog, you get a good sense why Pat Crowley loves her. She’s a paranoid union lap dog who offers no real solutions. Status quo is where it’s at for Pat. As for Streep and Davis, now it’s a left wing crime to donate to a private school? What’s next, boycotting there movies?
Ravitch is a professional shill and always has been. She made a fortune selling out to the No-Child-Left-Behind crowd, and now she’s playing the other side, bolstering her fortune coming up with anti-charter sound bytes for the roaring public union crowds and $100-500k union leadership behind the curtains. As recently as mid-2010, she was rabidly against progressive/constructivist curriculum. But now she realizes that progressives are one with the union special interests that pay her tab, so she threw out that part of her platform. Ditto with her “getting the worst teachers out of the classroom” advocacy – you don’t hear much of that at her high-priced union speaking engagements or in her op-eds full of self-righteous manufactured outrage and mindless progressive buzzwords like “corporatization.”
Some attack Ravitch because they cannot attack the research that backs her up.
Do you agree with the following:
“…While teachers are important, years of research confirms that teachers are not the most important factor in student learning.
- About 60% of a student’s achievement is explained by student and family characteristics; 20% pertains to school (with 10-15% being the teacher); 20% is unexplained (error). This has been confirmed in many studies.
- The correlation between poverty and test scores is nearly perfect.”
Source: Jersey Jazzman
Why does the educational reform methods used in Alberta, Canada get ignored in the US? If Alberta were its own country its school system would be in the top 10 in international ranking. The province had teachers and parents lead the reform, not billionaire privatizers.