RAVITCH: ‘LANGUAGE POLICE’ UNCHECKED

Special interest groups have imposed a mind-numbing “newspeak” on textbooks and recklessly pared the selection of original works available to spark serious dialogue in classrooms, a leading education reformer warned a QuEST general session audience.

Students are the losers in this Orwellian rush by both the far left and far right to sanitize texts and exams, said Diane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University. In the current environment, “the right gets to censor topics, the left gets to censor words, and the publishers cave to everybody,” Ravitch said.

Ravitch’s new book, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (Random House), is a scathing indictment of state textbook adoption committees as well as the textbook industry and its willingness to bow to the whims of narrow political interests.

The public typically isn’t aware of many of the concessions made by publishers who have concluded that it’s easier—and cheaper—to accommodate pressure groups through self-censorship than to fight for high-quality materials.

Ravitch cited examples from textbook publishers’ writing guidelines to illustrate the point: References to peanut cultivation have been scrapped because some children are allergic to peanuts; and dinosaurs, fossils and even extraterrestrials have been lifted from passages, thanks to pressure from groups that view these topics as “evolution-friendly” subjects.

One of the steps that Americans can take to reverse this trend, Ravitch said, is the elimination of state textbook adoption committees, which have been unwilling to stand up to special interest groups vying to impose their world-view on schools. Also key, she noted, is “to let teachers choose books” and support them in this effort with quality professional development that can lead them to useful original texts.

Excerpts from Ravitch’s new book appear in the Summer 2003 issue of American Educator magazine. The article also can be found at www.aft.org/american_educator/index.html.

IMPROVE SCHOOLS WITH ‘BEST TEACHERS,’ SAYS ROGERS

Professional development put her “on the path to becoming the professional educator I longed to be,” AFT member and 2003 National Teacher of the Year Betsy Rogers said at a QuEST general session. “It was not the end-all. It was the beginning.”

Within the last five years, Rogers has received her master’s degree, an educational specialist degree, a doctorate—and certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

In her remarks, she encouraged all teachers to pursue professional development opportunities—and to stay in the classroom after doing so. “Putting the best teacher possible in a classroom is the way we can improve schools,” Rogers said.

Many thought that with her additional degrees and completion of board certification, she would want to move into administration or a central office job, she said, “but that has never been my intention.”

“One teacher can make a difference,” Rogers stressed, recalling the Boston teacher who moved to a small Alabama town to “teach a child many thought hopeless.” That teacher was Anne Sullivan, and her student was Helen Keller.

“Anne Sullivan was described as highly trained and innovative in her methods,” Rogers noted. “I believe Anne Sullivan was a highly qualified teacher, and look at the impact she had on her student. Helen Keller was the first deaf-blind person to graduate from college, and she graduated with honors from Radcliffe. She went on to change laws for and attitudes about the handicapped.”

BUSH NEEDS TO MAKE A ‘REAL COMMITMENT TO KIDS’

The nation has a “moral obligation to fund schools,” especially those in the nation’s most disadvantaged communities, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) told conference participants.

Criticizing President Bush for his tax giveaway to the wealthiest Americans, Kerry said the administration’s empty rhetoric and harmful actions threaten the foundation of America’s public schools. “This is the biggest ‘say one thing and do another’ administration in the history of the country,” asserted Kerry.

Kerry blasted Bush and congressional Republicans for failing to fully support the No Child Left Behind Act. “Investment without accountability is a waste of money. Accountability without investment is a waste of potential.”

Calling for a rollback of the Bush tax cuts, the senator insisted that the government direct resources to the nation’s most disadvantaged communities—those without significant tax bases. When you rely on property taxes to fund schools, you end up with “separate and unequal school systems,” he said.

Kerry also called for investing in Head Start, Early Start and other early childhood education programs so that all students come to school ready to learn.
 

NORTON READS FROM HER BOOK, BLASTS VOUCHERS

Reading from a book chronicling her life, congressional Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) told QuEST participants of her journey from a “skinny little girl” growing up in a segregated Washington, D.C., to a well-known civil and women’s rights activist and member of Congress.

Norton read several excerpts from Fire in My Soul, an authorized biography written by Joan Steinau Lester (Atria Books, 2002), that trace her experience as a law school student working in Mississippi with such civil rights leaders as the late Medgar Evers and groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Norton also talked about her battle to keep a private school voucher program out of Washington, D.C. “They [Congress] have decided to force [vouchers] on the District of Columbia because they have failed everywhere else,” said Norton, who pointed to the unsuccessful efforts to include vouchers in the No Child Left Behind Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Calling residents of the District of Columbia the “least empowered people in the United States of America,” she urged the crowd to contact their senators and representatives to insist that they support full congressional voting rights for the District of Columbia. “If we had a senator, this would not be happening,” Norton said of attempts to impose vouchers on D.C. “Don’t give up. Help us fight this voucher plan.”

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