More on Diane Ravitch and inconvenient truths

If you missed the first of CSUMB's President's Speaker Series featuring Diane Ravitch, you will be able to listen to it in the upcoming days at KAZU (I'll post the broadcast time as soon as I find out it's been scheduled). If you don't want to wait, you may want to read her critique of "Waiting for Superman," the fall blockbuster that portrays the charter school movement as the savior of the education system of the good USA. Those who attended her presentation Wednesday will find the review oddly familiar.

Ravitch is a strong critic of the charter school movement, and she ripped Superman to pieces. Much of her criticism I've read before, but it was the first time I heard many of Ravitch's gems. That Geoffrey Canada's "miraculous" Harlem Children's Zone (one of the saviors in "Superman") kicked out an entire class of middle schoolers when they were not improving their test score and were going to make his funders look bad. That Locke High School (another Superman savior) did not produce much better test results than the surrounding schools in Los Angeles. That the SEED boarding school in D.C. (the fourth savior) spends $35,000 in spending per child. Like Ravitch says in her review: "Those who claim that better education for the neediest students won’t require more money cannot use SEED to support their argument."

A movie in response to "Waiting for Superman" -- aptly named "The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman" -- is in its final stages of production, but my guess is it won't have as wide distribution as Superman did. You can look at the trailer here.