Diane Ravitch
‘Reign of Error’
Michael Krasny
asks his guest why she calls the privatization of schools a hoax between minutes 5:53-11:12. Look
through the following extracts from the conversation and explain what each of
the expressions and phrasal verbs mean within the context.
DR - I find
myself stumbling over the word ‘reform’ when I see it attached to people like
Bill, Arne Duncan, Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, I go through the whole litany. These
guys are the status quo.
DR - … and to
call himself a reformer when he owns the
levers of power, it doesn’t make any sense.
DR - … and
the whole nation is now dancing to his tune.
DR - In fact,
these whole crowd of people who now call themselves reformers, are in fact
privatisers.
DR - The reason
that I am so critical about the charter movement is that it has strayed so far from
its original purpose.
DR - The original
purpose was that they would find the drop-outs,
they would bring the drop-outs back.
DR - They would
find innovative ways to engage kids who were totally turned off of school. They would not be judged by test scores
because they were taking the most challenging
students, the most difficult students.
MK - Too often
they turn them away though, don’t they?
DR - Well what’s
happened and this is why it’s a great hoax is that charter school now seek out the highest performing
students in the poorest communities and they have been critized even by federal
agencies for having disproportionately low numbers of students with
disabilities. They usually accept very low proportions of students who are
English language learners and then they kick
out the children with the low test scores.
DR - In the
state of Michigan more than 80% of the charter schools are run for profit and there are districts there which went into
deficit or which had very little test scores where the governor, who is a far
right reactionary governor, gave the entire school district to a for profit
charter chain.
MK - Education
shouldn’t be a consumer product, it should be a social and political
responsibility.
DR - Where there
is low performance, where there are schools that are really in trouble is where
there is a concentration of high poverty and high racial segregation. It’s as
though we’ve decided not to talk about the root
causes.
Host and
guest go on to talk about different issues related to education, if you are
interested you can listen to the rest of the programme and see what they have
to say about the Finnish education system (minutes 14:00-17:30), choice as a
code word to for education as a consumer good rather than a civic obligation
(as from 17:45) and the use of technology and the emergence of the education
industry (as from 19:19), among many others.
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