Identifying flaws and hypocrisy and what-the-heck-are-you-talking-about-ness in Diane Ravitch's arguments has become about as easy as taking candy from a particularly enfeebled infant?one with weak little fingers and no resolve?and about as pointless. If anyone can do it, why bother? But sometimes the baby is holding a bar made from Criollo cocoa, and you?simply can't resist. So here's just a bit from Ravitch's piece in the newest New York Review of Books:
The inspiration for Waiting for ?Superman? began, Guggenheim explains, as he drove his own children to a private school, past the neighborhood schools with low test scores . . . The press release for the film says that he wondered, ?How heartsick and worried did their parents feel as they dropped their kids off this morning?? Guggenheim is a graduate of Sidwell Friends, the elite private school in Washington, D.C., where President Obama's daughters are enrolled. The public schools that he passed by each morning must have seemed as hopeless and dreadful to him as the public schools in Washington that his own parents had shunned.
Or, in other words: ?David Guggenheim is an elite! His parents were elites! He's spoiled and, like his parents and maybe even?the Obamas, hates public schools! Ahhhhh!?
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow