Going Over to the Other Side

STOP THE PRESSES!  Steve Brill has dropped a BOMB on Ravitch (see below)…

 

Today is the first day I can write about Brill's blockbuster new book, Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1451611994/tilsoncapitalpar), which Amazon started shipping today (it's available on Kindle right now).  (Brill, as I'm sure you know, is the author of two seminal articles, Rubber Room in The New Yorker (www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_brill) and The Teachers' Unions' Last Stand in the NYT Magazine (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2010/05/teachers-unions-last-stand.html).)

It's a brilliant book about the rise of education reformers and the education wars over the past few years.  (Full disclosure: I'm one of the people featured prominently in the book, along with (off the top of my head – I've given my copies of the book away) Joel Klein, Joe Williams, Jon Schnur, Eva Moskowitz, Michael Johnston, Michelle Rhee – and, yes, Randi Weingarten, who perhaps gets more coverage in the book than anyone else.)

 

I'm going to be writing a lot about the book in future emails, but I want to start with the most important revelation: Diane Ravitch has been getting paid A LOT of money by the unions in the form of speaker fees – Brill estimates $10,000 per appearance and $200,000 over the past year – which by itself isn't a problem EXCEPT that: a) she's never disclosed these large payments, which anyone listening to her should know about; and b) she's a total hypocrite for criticizing reformers like me for supposedly making a lot of money from our activities (when in truth I've never taken a SINGLE PENNY and have instead given countless thousands of dollars and hours), while doing precisely this herself.

 

Below is the full text of Brill's 4-page chapter on Ravitch, entitled Going Over to the Other Side, and here's the end, where he discloses the money she's taking:

 

Randi Weingarten told me that she spoke with Ravitch often while she was preparing her book and urged her to take her message far and wide as soon as it was published, "because she had an important story to tell that no one else could tell." Weingarten and her union helped do that in a way that apparently rewarded Ravitch.

From February 2010 through March 2011, Ravitch would make fifteen speeches across the country, according to a schedule found on her own website, to local, state, or national units of the teachers' unions, plus nine to other groups--such as associations of local school boards or principals and a think tank funded by the NEA--that were also squarely in the anti-reform camp. During that time, Ravitch was listed by the Leading Authorities speakers bureau, which books speaking appearances, as charging a fee of $15,000 to $20,000 per speech, plus travel expenses.

Asked if she charged the unions whose cause was given such a life in her book Ravitch said, "Don't you charge for your speeches?" (Answer: Not if it's a group whose issues I am covering, or might cover in any way as a writer.) Assuming that Ravitch didn't get the sticker price for her speeches, but instead received an average of just $10,000 (which is what the Florida Education Association told me she was paid) that would mean more than $200,000 in little more than a year coming from the teachers' unions and others opposed to reform.

Ravitch told me in April 2011 that she had "an even fuller" schedule of speeches slated for the remainder of the year, although she declined to say how many would be paid for by the teachers' unions. "I was married to a wealthy man," she said, referring to Richard Ravitch, a successful construction company executive, real-estate developer, and banker, who served as New York's lieutenant governor from 2009 to the end of 2010, and from who she is divorced. "I live very comfortably. This is not about the money. I'm 72 and don't need money. If I want to speak to a group I'll do it for free or for a few thousand dollars if that's all they can pay.*

In her media appearances as the counterpoint to the reformers, Ravitch was identified only as an education historian and professor at New York University, not as someone who had accepted multiple speaking fees from the unions whose interest she was defending.

 

In light of this revelation, I will from now on ALWAYS refer to Ravitch as "paid union spokesperson Diane Ravitch" – and I urge you to do the same.  To be clear, I'm not saying that the unions are paying her to say things that she doesn't believe – I have no doubt that she's genuine in her beliefs – but these large payments are a massive conflict of interest that need to be disclosed every time she appears anywhere.  Imagine, for example, if I appeared on television commenting on charter schools, KIPP, TFA or DFER and not disclosing my tight affiliations with these organizations…

 

PS--You gotta love Ravitch's response, once she realizes that her secret has been exposed and Brill is going to write about it – here's Brill's footnote:

 

In an e-mail following this conversation, Ravitch told me that she was donating her speaking fees to a pediatric oncology program, dedicated in May 2011, in memory of her son, who had died of leukemia at age two.

 

This is classic Ravitch: knowing how bad this looks, she cleverly scrambles to come up with a solution that's designed to tug at the heartstrings and mute any possible criticism – and only AFTER she's been caught in the deception and banked all of this money (notice that she doesn't make clear if she's donating the hundreds of thousands of dollars she's already received, or only fees going forward).  I'm sorry if I appear heartless – I have no doubt that even after 40-odd years, she still feels acute pain at losing a child (I know I would) – but this is an obviously cynical move: given that she's receiving speaking fees based on her work in education, wouldn't it make sense for her to donate the fees to an education-related charity???

-------------------

Excerpt from Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools

 

Going Over to the Other Side

February 26, 2010, Washington, D.C.

On February 26, 2010, the Washington Post reported that "for those who believe that performance pay and charter schools pose a threat to public education and that a cult of testing and accountability has hijacked school reform, an unlikely national spokeswoman has emerged. Diane Ravitch, an education historian, now renounces many of the market-oriented policies she promoted as a former federal education official with close ties to Democrats and Republicans."

An anti-education reform blog appearing on the Post's website, called The Answer Sheet, supplemented the article with a triumphant report that Ravitch had "credibility with conservatives [which] is exactly why it would be particularly instructive for everyone--whether you have kids in school or not--to read The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Ravitch, who has spent some forty years in education, explains how she went from supporting No Child Left Behind and its testing and accountability regimes to becoming a vocal critic who think the very things she once backed are destroying public schools."

Reading the book and talking to Ravitch were disappointing for a writer hoping to find articulate arguments from the other side of the reform movement. It was easy to tell what Ravitch was against: She made fun of the "billionaire boys' club"--Gates, Broad, the Waltons (the Wal-Mart family), the hedge funders--who, she said, funded charter schools and other reforms as a favorite fad. She cited evidence from a national study showing that charter schools as a whole were an even mix of successes and failures, which ignored the more important studies that showed that where the chartering process was carefully overseen, such as New York, the schools generally performed better--in fact, much better--than public schools. She also ignored the central evidentiary value of charters like KIPP or Harlem Success: They proved that intense, effective teaching could overcome poverty and other obstacles and that, as Klein like to say, demography does not have to be destiny.

Ravitch said that the charter schools that did well cherry-picked the most motivated students and explained away the randomness of the lottery by arguing that the act of entering a lottery demonstrated unusual motivation by the students and their parents. This might have made sense but for research done by Tom Kane and published more than a year before her book was published, in which he compared data in Boston for students who had entered the lottery and won with those who had entered and lost. In other words, he controlled for this "motivation" factor. The result: The students who won and went to charters scored higher in subsequent years than those who lost. Same demographics, same motivation, different result.

And like Linda Darling-Hammond, Ravitch saw TFA as a bunch of ill-prepared dilettantes and snobs who flitted in and out of schools for a couple of years, abusing their students and disrupting normal school staffing processes. In fact, by now there was abundant independent research showing that, although teachers with at least three years of experience were generally more effective than all rookies, the TFA corps generally did better than non-TFA teachers in their initial two-year stints.

Ravitch was also against kids being overtested and teachers teaching to tests in order to win their performance pay. Those were, indeed, valid concerns. However, as Jessica Reid pointed out when we were discussing Ravitch's book and testing, "The kids in my class are going to have to take tests to get into college, and then take tests if they want to be doctors or lawyers. Tests suck. But they are a fact of life, and these kids start here with all of the disadvantages imaginable stacked against them. What's wrong with helping them learn and preparing them, and then having tests that prove that they have learned, when the assumption, without the tests, will always be that they aren't equipped for college or anything else? Do tests make kids nervous? Of course, but these kids have to be prepared for all kinds of things along the way, including tests, that are going to make them nervous. And if tests are also used to help tell someone whether I am a good teacher, why is that bad? Just because tests aren't perfect, doesn't mean you should not use them at all."

Those were all the things Ravitch was against. Other than a constant refrain for better curriculum standards and more research to see what might really work, it was impossible to tell from her book or our discussions what Ravitch was actually for.

Nonetheless, her book instantly became the unions' answer to the surge in reform hoopla caused by Race to the Top and the buzz emanating out of Sundance about Waiting for "Superman," which was scheduled for a full release in the fall as the school year started. Whenever someone from the reform side was booked on a talk show or quoted in a news article, Ravitch was often sitting there or quoted there, too. The anti-reformers had their own Nixon-to-China story.

Randi Weingarten told me that she spoke with Ravitch often while she was preparing her book and urged her to take her message far and wide as soon as it was published, "because she had an important story to tell that no one else could tell." Weingarten and her union helped do that in a way that apparently rewarded Ravitch.

From February 2010 through March 2011, Ravitch would make fifteen speeches across the country, according to a schedule found on her own website, to local, state, or national units of the teachers' unions, plus nine to other groups--such as associations of local school boards or principals and a think tank funded by the NEA--that were also squarely in the anti-reform camp. During that time, Ravitch was listed by the Leading Authorities speakers bureau, which books speaking appearances, as charging a fee of $15,000 to $20,000 per speech, plus travel expenses.

Asked if she charged the unions whose cause was given such a life in her book Ravitch said, "Don't you charge for your speeches?" (Answer: Not if it's a group whose issues I am covering, or might cover in any way as a writer.) Assuming that Ravitch didn't get the sticker price for her speeches, but instead received an average of just $10,000 (which is what the Florida Education Association told me she was paid) that would mean more than $200,000 in little more than a year coming from the teachers' unions and others opposed to reform.

Ravitch told me in April 2011 that she had "an even fuller" schedule of speeches slated for the remainder of the year, although she declined to say how many would be paid for by the teachers' unions. "I was married to a wealthy man," she said, referring to Richard Ravitch, a successful construction company executive, real-estate developer, and banker, who served as New York's lieutenant governor from 2009 to the end of 2010, and from who she is divorced. "I live very comfortably. This is not about the money. I'm 72 and don't need money. If I want to speak to a group I'll do it for free or for a few thousand dollars if that's all they can pay.*

In her media appearances as the counterpoint to the reformers, Ravitch was identified only as an education historian and professor at New York University, not as someone who had accepted multiple speaking fees from the unions whose interest she was defending.

As education reform became a hot topic in the lead-up to the announcement of the winners of Round One of the Race to the Top, Ravitch became the unions' best counterpunch.

*In an e-mail following this conversation, Ravitch told me that she was donating her speaking fees to a pediatric oncology program, dedicated in May 2011, in memory of her son, who had died of leukemia at age two.