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Saturday, August 18, 2012

What Readers Said About CNN and Randi Kaye « Diane Ravitch's blog

What Readers Said About CNN and Randi Kaye « Diane Ravitch's blog:


What Readers Said About CNN and Randi Kaye

I taped an interview with Randi Kaye of CNN Newsroom on Friday August 17. I was invited to do this interview in response to her earlier interview with Michelle Rhee.
I went to CNN assuming I was invited to express my differences with Rhee, who gets far more airtime than I to present her agenda of attacking US education, smearing teachers, calling for an end to tenure and seniority, and demanding merit pay, charter schools, vouchers, for-profit charter schools, for-profit virtual schools, and more testing.
But there was no discussion of my views, no opportunity to present them. Instead I faced a series of loaded questions intended to put me on the defensive (some of the worst were left out of the televised version). They were “gotcha” questions. What do you say to this? And what about that?
My early response –before the interview aired–may have led them to edit out the first line of questioning, when Randi Kaye claimed that NAEP scale scores showed the “failure” of American education. She didn’t know what