Diane Ravitch is coming to speak in Sacramento on January 20th! You can contact the Sacramento City Teachers Association or your own Local for tickets. I’ve written a lot about Diane over the years, but I thought I’d have my colleague Alice Mercer write a guest post about her and the event. Here it is:

Diane Ravitch is a tireless advocate on behalf of education, debunking advocates of dangerous and unproven ideas under the guise of reform. At the same time, she provides realistic approaches for improving our education system based on both experience and research. Her experience and academic credentials, paired with her intelligence and compassion make her one of the strongest voices for education and our students today. Here are five reasons you should come to hear Dr. Ravitch when she speaks at the Sacramento Convention Center on January 20th:

  1. Her extensive work on improving education standards, and on the development of the NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) test –also called the Nation’s Report Card– mean that she knows what she’s talking about when she says we are testing too much and not educating students enough.
  2. She is one of the leading education historians of our time, and has an extensive body of work on this subject. When she turned her attention to school reform, in “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” she brought both compelling story-telling, and meticulous research to show how a small group of influential billionaires is now controlling both the debate and implementation of education reform.
  3. She was an early supporter of innovations, like charter schools, but is now a vocal critic of them as they have turned from sources of innovation to help children to sources of revenue for for-profit entities.
  4. She worked in the first Bush administration as Assistant Secretary of Education, and was an early supporter of No Child Left Behind. She is now a vocal critic of this program as test scores became more important than actually educating our youth.
  5. Her work is motivated by true compassion and concern for what we are doing to our children in the name of education “reform”.
Thanks, Alice!