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Diane Ravitch

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“The other article was by Lois Weiner, a professor who prepared urban teachers at New Jersey City University. Weiner was a parent activist at P.S. 3 in District 2, which she described as a highly progressive alternative school with an unusual degree of parent involvement. She claims that district administrators were stifling teachers and parents at P.S.3 by mandating "constructivist" materials and specific instructional strategies ... She [Weiner] continued, "The degree of micromanagement is astounding." Those who challenged the district office's mandates, she said, risked getting an unsatisfactory rating or being fired. Weiner contended that "opposition from parents is building against the new math curriculum," which was supposed to be field-tested with control groups, but instead was mandated for every classroom." Teachers were expressly prohibited from using other math textbooks or materials, and some were clandestinely "photocopying pages of now-banned workbooks.”

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Book:The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
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“Perhaps the greatest obstacle to systemic reform was that it required numerous stakeholders - textbook publishers, test publishers, schools of education, and so on - to change, which turned out to be an insurmountable political obstacle.”

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Book:The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
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“The state put a Broad-trained superintendent, Randy Ward, in charge of the Oakland schools ... Ward embraced the small schools but went further; his school reform plan aimed to turn the district into a marketplace of school choice while overhauling the bureaucracy. He closed low-performing schools and opened charter schools. He attracted $26 million in grants from the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Dell Foundation, and corporations based in Oakland.”

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Book:The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
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