By Abby Phillip
(From Politico, July 30, 2011)
Ravitch’s public speaking schedule over the last year included more than a dozen speeches across the country to local AFT and NEA affiliates. Brill suggested that some of those appearances carried a price tag of between $15,000 and $20,000. But Ravitch, for her part, said she has never received speaking fees approaching the sums that Brill claims.
“That is a flat out untruth,” Ravitch told POLITICO. “Most of my speaking appearances to union groups have been for free.”
Spokesmen for NEA, AFT and the Gates Foundation all declined to comment for this story.
“I think that the critique does still stand because if you were to look at the proportion of funding that AFT and NEA get from the Gates Foundation I would guess that it’s less than one percent of the revenue,” Cody said. “But if you look at a lot of these astroturf organizations, virtually all of their money is coming from these foundations.”
“They should not be taking direction from the Gates Foundation,” he added. “Many of the groups that are taking money from the Gates Foundation are taking direction from the Gates Foundation.”
Ravitch’s critics say her argument against foundations that fund education initiatives expose larger problems with her broad brush critique.
“Diane is selective about who she calls out on this stuff,” said Charlie Barone of Democrats for Education Reform. “There are schools in New York and all over the country that raise money by all kinds of private means, and they’re not called out because they’re not challenging the system.”
One object of Ravitch’s criticism felt compelled to respond when Ravitch attacked his school and two others that had been highlighted by Obama and Duncan as examples of successful education models in a New York Times opinion piece in May.
Tim King, president of Chicago’s Urban Prep Academy, a charter school for African American males that has successfully matriculated all of its graduates into four year colleges, challenged some of Ravitch’s facts as simply wrong in a rebuttal published in the Huffington Post. Ravitch said Urban Prep’s students actually fared much worse than their peers in public schools by some measures, but later admitted her source got some of those facts wrong.
“The sad and damaging part about this,” King said in an interview with POLILTICO, “is that folks like Ravitch and others…have a unique opportunity to elevate the conversation beyond the pro-union, anti-union conversation; and I don’t think they’re taking the opportunity to do that because they’re playing to their base.”
Ravitch responded that she did not criticize Urban Prep Academy but the politicians who used the school to claim that schools alone can fix inequality. She said she believes that schools and society must both improve. “The U.S. leads the developed world in child poverty,” she said. “More than 20 percent of our children live in poverty. That’s a national disgrace.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described Diane Ravitch’s relationship with teachers unions. Ravitch was a close friend of Albert Shanker, the AFT’s late president, and has worked closely with the union over the years.