Diane Ravitch is probably the most knowledgeable historian of education in 
the country. I follow her blog daily.
Among her many accomplishments, Ms. Ravitch served in the first Bush administration and was an early advocate for the standardized testing that blights our public schools today.
But, unlike so many, Ravitch is a true scholar who is willing to admit her mistakes. Today she is one of the most avid and effective critics of US education policy, including the disastrous appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education.
For anyone interested or concerned about public education and its steady
destruction in this country, I recommend Ms. Ravitch’s two most recent books, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools and The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing 
and Choice Are Undermining Education.
I am a product of public schools. I am also a former college professor with first-hand experience in the bureaucratic control imposed by the federal government with its irrational insistence on management targets, treating the classroom as if it were just another production line, easily improved by more measurement, more standardized tests, more outcome assessments and “evidence-based methods.”
But NOTHING mad me crazier than the blanket assumption that all responsibility for student performance lay ENTIRELY with the teacher.
Today, Ravitch provides this excerpt from an analysis by one of her friends at the blog Curmudgucation.
“A few nuggets of Peter-Greene-Wisdom:
Here are the areas they believe “require more exploration”
Evidence-based solutions for writing instruction, including mastery of the “spectrum of skills encompassing narrative, descriptive, expository and/or persuasive writing models,” a “spectrum” that I’ll argue endlessly is not an actual thing, but is a fake construct created as a crutch for folks who don’t know how to teach or assess writing.
New proficiency metrics. Can we have “consistent measures of student progress and proficiency”? I’m saying “probably not.” “Can we use technology to support new, valid, efficient, and reliable writing performance measures that are helpful for writing coaching?” No, we can’t.
Educator tools and support. Gates-Zuck correctly notes that “effective” writing instruction requires time and resources, so the hope here is, I don’t know– the invention of a time machine? Hiring administrative assistants for all teachers? Of course not– they want to create “tools” aka more technology trying to accomplish what it’s not very good at accomplishing.
Always looking for ways to get better. Kind of like every decent teacher on the planet. I swear– so much of this rich amateur hour baloney could be helped by having these guys shadow an actual teacher all day every day for a full year. At the very least, it would save these endless versions of “I imagine we could move things more easily if we used round discs attached to an axel. I call it… The Wheeble!”
They want your ideas about “Measuring and Improving Executive Function,” which Peter says should creep you out. It creeps me out!
This is personalized [sic] learning at its worst– a kind of Big Brother on Steroids attempt to take over the minds, hearts, and lives of children for God-knows-what nefarious schemes. Only two things make me feel just the slightest bit better about this.
First of all, I’m not sure that Gates-Zuck are evil mad scientist types, cackling wickedly in their darkened laboratory. I’m more inclined to see them as feckless-but-rich-and-powerful computer nerds, who still believe that education is just an engineering problem that can be solved by properly designed sufficiently powered software. They’re technocrats who think a bigger, better machine is the best way to fix human beings.
Second of all– well, wait a minute. The two guys who have bombarded education with enough money to make a small island and who do not have a single clear-cut success to point to– these guys think they’ve got it figured out this time? They have never yet figured out how to better educate the full range of ordinary students (nor ever figured out what “better educate” means) now think they can unlock the formula for better educating students with larger challenges?
This is like going to a circus and the announcer hollers that Evel Von Wheeble is going to jump his motorcycle over fifty buses, and you get very excited until you read the program and see that Von Wheeble previously attempted to jump over ten, twenty and twenty-five buses– and he failed every time.”
