Ravitch Answers Gates

[Alice Aman]

In our discussion of THE REIGN OF ERROR by Diane Ravitch, last night I
voiced my desire to understand how someone who is in the non-greedy,
relatively non-political "camp" can support the charter schools that
have been established with no-accountability to the taxpayer yet they
get public funding. And who can be in the "camp" that thinks teachers
that need firing are the problem with our public educational system.
This blog entry below has cleared up much of my confusion. Though I
was hesitant to think that someone as smart as Bill Gates is reputed
to be and who has the resources he has to investigate and learn could
be ignorant of an issue his foundation has dumped so much money on to
support. Well, this blog entry goes a long way in convincing me that
Bill Gates' credibility on this is extremely poor.

I especially like the section below where he says basically that if
she has a "magic bullet", he is all ears. Her credibility jumps to
99% for me when she answers him by saying "there is no magic bullet".
WOW! I want this woman to run for president. LOL.

Ravitch answers Gates --
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/diane-ravitch/ravitch-answers-gates.html

p.s. As being someone who supports unions (with the caveat of knowing
they are flawed and need oversight as much as the charter schools and
probably more), I feel I must offer some self-disclosure here saying
my husband is an attorney who does much of his work in employment law.
I know from his work the difficulties of Public Service Employees in
the state of Texas who are not-unionized or have no employment
agreement.

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Next discussion for our Houston Nonfiction group (meets at Houston
Central Market community room - 7pm)

July 16 THE REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING: Death and the American Civil War
by Faust [pub 2009] 346 pages
Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award finalist. Author is President
of Harvard Univ.
Book documents the social, religious, and psychological coping
mechanisms adopted by Civil War America. More than a book about the
Civil War, it's also a meditation on the meaning of war and the human
need to somehow infuse meaning into an enterprise that often seems so
bleakly wasteful and tragically brutal.
--Anne leading the discussion