The American Spectator

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So how can the malicious nonsense be stopped? Succumbing a bit to the educationese she often mocks, Ravitch offers a threefold "strategy to achieve this goal." First, "eliminate the state textbook adoption process," which gives California and Texas, with their huge public school markets, undue control over decisions made by a few giant publishers. The leverage of the two big states allows the extremists to concentrate their pressure tactics and force adoption decisions that affect the whole nation.

Ravitch favors a radical deregulation of textbook adoption, freeing teachers to choose their own materials and thus forcing the political busybodies "to make their case to millions of teachers and thousands of schools" rather than threaten a few big publishers at statewide hearings. The competition would bring in new publishers and truly talented writers. "Bad textbooks would die a natural and unlamented death."

But the market solution depends entirely on two other "prongs" of the Ravitch strategy. We must first expose the bastards (Ravitch is more delicate: she favors "sunshine" laws that require the publishers and state agencies to open their secretive "bias guidelines" for public scrutiny), and we need "better-educated teachers" who can make wise use of the freedom to select their own materials.

Critical skills question: Which of these three "prongs" is so remote as to render the Ravitch strategy nearly hopeless? Read the book, and decide for yourself. And think about homeschooling.

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