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Saturday, October 17, 2015

Chalkbeat Colorado Criticizes Pro-Public School Candidate for Using My Words: I Say, It’s OK with Me! | Diane Ravitch's blog

Chalkbeat Colorado Criticizes Pro-Public School Candidate for Using My Words: I Say, It’s OK with Me! | Diane Ravitch's blog:

Chalkbeat Colorado Criticizes Pro-Public School Candidate for Using My Words: I Say, It’s OK with Me!







This morning, I got a Google alert about a story mentioning me that appeared in Chalkbeat Colorado (funded by Gates and other generous foundations). The story criticized a candidate running for school board because her questionnaire included phrases from me and other anti-corporate reform writers without attributing the quotations.
I thought it odd to single out one candidate for condemnation, when she is running against a well-funded corporate machine that finances its candidates with hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Denver currently has a school board in which every single member has been elected to support corporate reform, i.e., high-stakes testing and charters. As Jeannie Kaplan has written on this blog (see here andhere), ten years of these “reform” policies has not improved the performance of the District’s neediest students.
I sent a message to the reporter, and he advised me to post it as a comment on the Chalkbeat website. Every time I tried to post, the website said I had already signed up and couldn’t sign up again. No matter how I tried, having signed up without knowing about it, I could not post my comment. So I am sharing it here, and hope that it gets to readers in Denver.
Eric,
I saw your post about Kristi Butkovich this morning.


If she used my words in her campaign for school board, I am very pleased she did. Please tell your readers that I freely grant my Chalkbeat Colorado Criticizes Pro-Public School Candidate for Using My Words: I Say, It’s OK with Me! | Diane Ravitch's blog: