Kyle Smith’s hatchet job on Diane Ravitch’s new book “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to Public Schools,” misses the mark (“Pain in the Class,” PostScript, Sept. 15).
He castigates her for using “meaningless and irrelevant buzzwords that she hopes will inspire ill will,” yet is unable to restrain himself from using inflammatory phrases such as “monopoly stranglehold,” “dropout factory” and “terrible schools.”
He berates her for her dramatic shift on education policy and insinuates that it was for personal reasons. Isn’t she allowed to change her mind?
Smith claims charter schools are somehow an antidote to “thug dictatorship, where only one name appears on the ballot.”
It is not healthy for our democracy when both names on the ballot champion these retrograde policies, and the press is united in support of them.
Robert Berger
Bellerose
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Ravitch offers positive recommendations for improving our public schools while exposing the fallacies and foibles of the pseudo-reformers.
Edd Doerr
President, Americans for Religious Liberty
Silver Spring, Md.
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Smith has fallen for the same soft-soap stuff as others when it comes to the newest educational reform movement: Common Core.
There’s not a soul who doesn’t want better schools. But Smith appears to be parsing the Common Core reform movement in simplistic terms. He focuses mostly on teacher unions and inner-city school issues.
Common Core is a national education movement designed to castrate local boards of education and homogenize educational curricula from coast-to-coast.
He also slaps away the corporate-interest concerns in this movement — as though corporations and federal education wonks have found the Holy Grail to better educational outcomes.
The same forces brought us ObamaCare and, of course, the US Postal Service. That alone should scare everyone.
Denis S. Ahearn, Sr.
Port Chester