Once-respectable education historian Diane Ravitch has long ago proven that she’ll plumb any depths of intellectual charlatanism and moral demagoguery — even to the point of engaging in blatant race-baiting and politicizing tragedy. So it isn’t shocking to your editor that Ravitch attempted to denigrate the views of former CNN anchor-turned-school reform advocate Campbell Brown in an interview with the Washington Post by claiming that her efforts to end near-lifetime job security for laggard teachers and overhaul teacher dismissal laws aren’t worth considering (and, in fact, “illogical”) because she is “telegenic” and “pretty”. Having already engaged in racism back in May when she wrote that 50CAN honcho and new-era civil rights activist Derrell Bradford should go into “sports or finance or broadcasting”, Ravitch’s sexist remarks against Brown are just another example of her despicable shamelessness.
Your editor doesn’t need to defend Brown. For one, she’s proven more than capable of going toe-to-toe with the likes of Ravitch, and Jonathan Chait of New York has already gone to bat for her. There’s also the fact that Ravitch just doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously. Her racial myopia and racialism (along with her dilettantism) has been apparent since she dismissed black families in Ocean Hill-Brownsville attempting to become lead decision-makers in the Big Apple’s traditional district in 1972’s The Great School Wars: A history of New York City schools. So I expect nothing less from the likes of her.
What will be interesting is the reaction from hardcore progressive traditionalists — who as much proclaim themselves to be feminists as they call themselves opponents of racialism — to Ravitch’s latest remarks. If the past is any guide, it is more than likely that traditionalists will not only not call Ravitch on the carpet for her remarks, they will even defend them because Brown is one of those so-called corporate education reformers who are threatening their ideology and finances.
After all, they defended Ravitch after reformers such as Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute called her out for racialist remarks against Bradford. A year earlier, they defended another demagogue within their camp, American Federation of Teachers honcho-turned-Albert Shanker Institute boss Leo Casey, after he raised the specter of antisemitism against Brown by accusing her of committing a “blood libel” against teachers by calling out the union and its Big Apple affiliate for defending criminally abusive instructors. And they rallied around both Ravitch and Karen Lewis, the president of the AFT’s Chicago Teachers Union, after they both politicized the massacre of 23 teachers and children in Newtown, Conn., as part of their attempt to smear reformers.
So we shouldn’t expect anything less than a broad defense of Ravitch this time around. In fact, you can already see it in the responses to Chait’s critique of her demagoguery. Which proves this reality: Progressive education traditionalists like to claim to be foes of racialism and other social ills — until their own allies commit such nastiness against those whom they oppose. When their allies behave badly, progressive traditionalists will do everything they can to defend them, even when they should be shaming them and demanding them to apologize. As far as these band of traditionalists are concerned, bigotry and sexism is okay so long as it is committed against what they think are the right kind of people.
Simply put, Ravitch’s sleaziness is a reflection of the rather demagogic worldviews of progressives within traditionalist ranks and, in some ways, traditionalists in general, especially when it comes to dealing with minorities and women who dare oppose their failed policies and practices that have harmed kids for decades. Particularly when it comes to blacks, progressive traditionalists only oppose bigotry against them when they follow in lockstep with their ideology. But this shouldn’t be shocking. For all the proclamations from the Ravitch crowd that they care about children — especially those from poor and minority backgrounds — they continuously defend a system that harms them by perpetuating the legacies of Jim Crow segregation, nativism, and religious bigotry. Which makes all of them anything and everything but progressive.