Ravitch Bars Talk of DNC Rigging of 2016 Primary Race

Since last November, Diane Ravitch has spent an inordinate amount of time painting horns on Betsy DeVos and labeling her as the Chief Privatizer of American Schools.  While it is certainly important to point out the lunacy and danger of DeVos's fanciful plan to expand the small number of states that have voucher laws, Diane has ignored the privatizing role that she, herself, has played by giving approving to ESSA and by okaying the 7,600 existing charter schools and by refusing to repudiate charter school laws in 46 states.  

More importantly, Diane refuses to talk about how she came to support these corporate ed reform policies.  She refuses to talk about Weingarten's authoritarian endorsement of CorpEd's calendar girl, Hillay Clinton, in July 2015, just a month before Hillary paid $20 million to gain control of the DNC during the Fall of 2015.

In a post today, Dr. Ravitch reminds us that some things must remain secret and that the past is only important only if we all agree on it.  If the understanding of past is contentious and makes us uncomfortable about outcomes of events that we helped to shape, then it's best to keep quiet about it so that maybe people will forget about our culpability in making a reality that we now denounce.

She tells her readers:

Carry on your claims and counterclaims about the 2016 election elsewhere. All such comments will go into moderation as soon as I see them and may never be posted. It is my blog and I say enough is enough. The only person helped by the prolongation of this discussion is Trump. 

Right now, please focus on the Tuesday elections, especially in Virginia and New Jersey.  In Virginia, Republican Ed Gillespie has resorted to racist attacks on Ralph Northam.  

Please look to saving what we can and building for the future, not wallowing in events that we can argue about endlessly, without any resolution. 

Wow--not much respect for history by someone often recognized as an historian. It's clear that DR has no respect for the old adage, "those who are unwilling to recall the past are doomed to repeat it." And because she refuses to remember the past, she is helping the DNC to continue the same mistakes that led to political positions that mealy-mouthed, amorphous, poorly-defined, and typically spineless.

Ralph Northam is in trouble in Virginia because he sounds too much like the DNC candidates that were/are the Clinton choices: uninspiring, lifeless, patronizing, and cowardly.  

As others have noted since this Donna Brazile's offered the clip from her book (please don't buy it) about Hillary's purchase of the DNC in August 2015, the most popular politician today is the guy who got the shaft from the DNC.  Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in America not because he is left of center.  Bernie is most popular because he is proud of his positions, unwavering in his support for them, and people know what they are.

To know where we are today requires that we know where we have been.  The outcome in the future depends upon it.  

Sanders on "Enormous Neglect" and "Ultimate Failure" of Democratic Party

Please share with the BATs and NPE and AFT and NEA and FairTest and Basecamp bloggers and all the other pathetic asshats and hangers-on who have supported the demise of teaching and public education by loyally supporting the failed policies embraced by the DNC and the Clintons. 

No more complicity, collaboration, or compromise.  Your way has brought us the horrors of Trump, and your day is done!

DeVos Will Make Democrats' Charter Plan Easier to Sell

A few years back Diane Ravitch was forced to admit openly what the opponents of testing accountability knew when No Child Left Behind became law: the ridiculous goal of 100% percent student proficiency in reading and math could never be met, and the fanciful imposition of such a pipe dream would wreak havoc across the entire K-12 education universe.

By the time Ravitch finally came around to acceding the dangerous fantasy that she had loyally promoted along with her fellow charter and voucher supporters at the Hoover Institution, almost half the schools in the U. S. had already been labeled as failures, and a reckless and corrupt corporate feeding frenzy had been set into motion by Ravitch's free market chums.  Tutoring companies were draining billions in federal dollars by cramming poor children for tests they would never pass; the scandal-ridden Reading First gang was shoving its antiquarian reading techniques nationwide to really bad effect; alternate teacher certification scams had been federally incentivized; charter schools, both virtual and physical, were springing up like mushrooms in cow paddies after a rain, and a whole new industry of sponsored fake education research by corporate foundation "think" tanks had become an acceptable occupation for under-employed academics.

During the seven years since Ravitch's lucrative conversion experience, Diane has made it clear that she maintains one foot solidly on the side of the corporate education reformers who brought us the NCLB disaster.  It took her until 2013 to admit her stubborn wrongheadedness on Common Core, even while maintaining even today her support for "voluntary" national standards--whatever that means.  Today she maintains her enthusiasm for shoveling Core Knowledge into the heads of children, just as she remains a supporter of ridiculously high NAEP standards that have been used by "reformers" for years to bludgeon the public schools for their low scores.

In early 2015, her crucial support for NCLB 2.0, which is better known as ESSA, made her culpablility undeniable. This was followed by a year of propagandizing for the longtime charter supporter, Hillary Clinton, while pretending to be the most determined foe of school corporatization.  Diane's blog was used to soft-pedal Weingarten's autocratic choice of Clinton over Sanders, just as it was used to obfuscate Hillary's supportive position on corporate welfare charters.  And it was her political soulmate, Randi Weingarten, who put the final flourishes on the Democratic platform, which clearly supported charter schools while pretending to do the opposite.

Her recent outlining for Jay Mathews the kind of charter schools she would support signals that she is ready to swing both legs onto the side of the charter fence.  Along with the NEA's Eskelsen, AFT's Weingarten, and the troglodytes running the DNC, Ravitch is clearly signaling surrender on charters to Team Trump, even before the first inaugural dance.

Ravitch, as lead propagandist for the corporate unions, will use the Betsy DeVos nomination to make the Dem position of supporting "non-profit" segregated no excuses charters seem most reasonable in comparison.  It is not a coincidence that Ravitch is suddenly playing footsie with charter spokesman, Jay Mathews.

The ESSA, which could not have happened without NPE, NEA, and AFT support, will continue intact, thus allowing Trump, too, to appear reasonable in letting public schools die a slower death than Sister Betsy would have preferred.  And thus the bipartisan dismantling of public education is likely to continue on schedule.  The biggest change we are likely to see in Washington are the corporate Democrats from the Gates Foundation heavily reinforced by the corporate Republicans from the Walton Foundation.

Oh yes, don't forget to send your next donation to NPE.  Ravitch and the corporate unions need your support to buy a whole new supply of whitewash.

Curmudgucation Reads Verdict on Hillary, But Co-Defendants Ignored

In coming to the evidentiary edge of connecting the dots among the DNC, DFER, Gates/Broad, and NEA/AFT, Curmuducation is pressing the envelope on preserving his elevated status in Diane Ravitch's Blogger Hall of Fame.  But he is not there yet, having stopped just short of a guilty verdict for Weingarten and Garcia for co-conspiring to allow the destruction of public schools and the teaching profession. 

Rather, it is Hillary whose verdict Peter Greene is here to deliver:

I would say that the jury is still out on Hillary, but honestly, I'd be lying. Hillary is pretty clearly tied to the same charter-loving, reform-pushing, corporate-driven, test-and-punishing reformsters as our last two Presidents. CAP, one of the fiercest reformster-driven advocacy groups in DC, was simply a holding pen for Clinton campaign leaders like John Podesta; they are close to Hillary and they have never, ever, been a friend to public education or public school teachers. DFER, a group that absolutely loathes teachers and the teachers union, is delighted that Hillary is running.

Meanwhile, Anthony Cody has been put in charge of pretending that there is some conversion process underway that will bring the wayward Weingarten and Garcia into the Ravitch fold.  The idiocy of such a notion is too ridiculous for comment.

Cody, in fact, needs time and resources to get his next big NPE talkathon in Orlando arranged, and he can't do it without the laundered Gates money that NEA and AFT have for him.

How teachers can continue to support this political pyramid scheme is truly baffling.