Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America's Public Schools

Author: Ravitch, Diane

Brand: VINTAGE

Color: White

Binding: paperback

Format: Import

Number Of Pages: 352

Release Date: 22-09-2020

Details: Product Description


From one of the foremost authorities on education in the United States,
Slaying Goliath is an impassioned, inspiring look at the ways in which parents, teachers, and activists are successfully fighting back to defeat the forces that are trying to privatize America’s public schools.
 
Diane Ravitch writes of a true grassroots movement sweeping the country, from cities and towns across America, a movement dedicated to protecting public schools from those who are funding privatization and who believe that America’s schools should be run like businesses and that children should be treated like customers or products.
 

Slaying Goliath is about the power of democracy, about the dangers of plutocracy, and about the potential of ordinary people—armed like David with only a slingshot of ideas, energy, and dedication—to prevail against those who are trying to divert funding away from our historic system of democratically governed, nonsectarian public schools. Among the lessons learned from the global pandemic of 2020 is the importance of our public schools and their teachers and the fact that distance learning can never replace human interaction, the pesonal connection between teachers and students.


Review


“[A] thought-provoking, painstakingly researched account. . . . A rallying cry.” —
The Washington Post

“A fervent defense of public education with abundant examples of how privatization has failed to deliver on its promises.” —
Kirkus Reviews


About the Author


DIANE RAVITCH was born in Houston, Texas, and graduated from Wellesley College and Columbia University. She is a research professor of education at New York University and the author of eleven books. Ravitch is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.


Chapter 1

Disruption Is Not Reform!

I started to write this book in the spring of 2018 at an unusual moment in our nation’s 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 int

EAN: 9780525564768

Package Dimensions: 11.7 x 7.9 x 0.7 inches

Languages: English