INTRODUCTION: YES, DIANE, I''M STILL ANGRY R ecently I was invited by education activist Dr. Raynard Sanders to New Orleans for an educational summit. The speaker, the renowned and controversial Diane Ravitch, had told Dr. Sanders that she wanted to meet me. Dr. Ravitch, currently a professor at New York University, has made headlines with her about-face on many issues related to public education. Ravitch was the assistant secretary of education in the George H.W.

Bush administration, where she made her conservative intellectual and political reputation with her staunch support of standardized testing, charter schools, the No Child Left Behind Act, and free market competition for schools. She has now repudiated many of her earlier positions, stated both in public presentations and in her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education . This courageous scholar has resigned from influential conservative policy groups and has incited many powerful enemies. As a result, in contrast to her former life as a popular conservative commentator, she has now found herself barred from expressing her new views in many popular venues. Before the speech began, I joined Diane, Raynard, and a few invited guests in an adjoining room. Diane and I talked about the devastation of public schools in post-Katrina New Orleans and how politicians and educational entrepreneurs hawking privatization are claiming the travesty of New Orleans education to be a national model. Diane asked me why I hadn''t spoken out nationally against what was happening. I told her about my work in New Orleans and my modestly successful attempts to engage other African American scholars in the struggle against what was happening there.

I added that the sense of futility in the battle for rational education policy for African American children had gone on for so long and that I had come to feel so tired, that I now needed to focus on those areas where I felt I could actually make a difference: working with teachers and children in an African American school. I was so angry from the sensation of butting my head against a brick wall, I told her, that I needed to give my "anger muscles" a rest. Diane looked at me squarely and said, "You don''t look angry." I realized two things at that moment. One was that Diane''s anger was relatively raw and still fresh and hadn''t yet needed to be modulated. It must have been quite a shock to go from being an influential authority whose views were sought and valued in most political circles to being a virtual outcast. While it was undeniably courageous to reanalyze one''s positions and come to a significantly different stance, it has to be anger-provoking to realize that the power elite seem less interested in logical analyses for the public good than in maintaining power and profit. Her anger had a different quality than the anger of those of us who have struggled with the same issues for many years.

The second thing I realized was that, yes, I am still angry--despite my attempts over the years to calm my spirit and to focus on the wonder of teaching and learning. I am angry at the machinations of those who, with so little knowledge of learning, of teachers, or of children, are twisting the life out of schools. I am angry that public schools, once a beacon of democracy, have been overrun by the antidemocratic forces of extreme wealth. Educational policy for the past decade has largely been determined by the financial contributions of several very large corporate foundations. Among a few others, the Broad, Gates, and Walton (Walmart) foundations have dictated various "reforms" by flooding the educational enterprise with capital. The ideas of privatization, charter schools, Teach for America, the extremes of the accountability movement, merit pay, increased standardized testing, free market competition--all are promulgated and financially supported by corporate foundations, which indeed have those funds because they can avoid paying the taxes that the rest of us must foot. Thus, educational policy has been virtually hijacked by the wealthiest citizens, whom no one elected and who are unlikely ever to have had a child in the public schools. I am angry that with all of the corporate and taxpayers'' money that is flowing into education, little-to-none is going to those valiant souls who have toiled in urban educational settings for many years with proven track records.

Instead, money typically goes to those with little exposure to and even less experience in urban schools. I am left in my more cynical moments with the thought that poor black children have become the vehicle by which rich white people give money to their friends. I am angry because of the way that the original idea of charter schools has been corrupted. In their first iteration, charter schools were to be beacons for what could happen in public schools. They were intended to develop models for working with the most challenging populations. What they discovered was to be shared and reproduced in other public school classrooms. Now, because of the insertion of the "market model," charter schools often shun the very students they were intended to help. Special education students, students with behavioral issues, and students who need any kind of special assistance are excluded in a multiplicity of ways because they reduce the bottom line--they lower test scores and take more time to educate properly.

Charter schools have any number of ways of "counseling" such students out of their programs. I have been told by parents that many charter schools accuse students of a series of often trivial rule infractions, then tell parents that the students will not be suspended if the parents voluntarily transfer them to another school. Parents of a student with special needs are told that the charter is not prepared to meet their child''s needs adequately and that he or she would be much better served at the regular public school around the corner. (Schools in New Orleans, the "model city" for charters, have devised an even more sinister scheme for keeping unwanted children out of the schools. The K-12 publicly funded charter schools, which are supposed to be open to all through a lottery system of enrollment, are giving preferential admission to children who have attended an affiliated private preschool, one of which charges over $4,000 in tuition and the other over $9,000.)1 In addition, the market-driven model insists that should charter schools actually discover workable, innovative ideas, they are not to be shared with other public schools but held close to the vest to prevent "competitors" from "winning" the standardized test race. So now, charter schools are not meant to contribute to "regular" public education but to put it out of business. I am angry about the hypocrisy rampant in education policy.

While schools and teachers are admonished to adhere to research-based instruction and data-driven planning, there is no research to support the proliferation of charter schools, pay-for-performance plans, or market-based school competition. Indeed, where there is research, it largely suggests that we should do an about-face and run in the opposite direction. I am angry that the conversation about educating our children has become so restricted. What has happened to the societal desire to instill character? To develop creativity? To cultivate courage and kindness? How can we look at a small bundle of profound potential and see only a number describing inadequacy? Why do we punish our children with our inability to teach them? How can we live with the fact that in Miami--and I am certain in many other cities--ten-year-olds facing failure on the state-mandated FCAT test and being "left back" in third grade for the third time, have had to be restrained from committing suicide? I am angry at what the inflexibility and wrong-headed single-mindedness of schools in this era have done to my child and to so many other children. There is little tolerance for difference, for creativity, or for challenge. The current use of standardized tests, which has the goals of promoting competition between schools and of making teacher and principal salaries--and sometimes even employment--dependent on tests scores, seems to bring out the worst in adults as well. In locale after locale--including Washington, DC; Georgia; Indiana; Massachusetts; Nevada; and Virginia, to name a few--there are investigations into widespread allegations of cheating by teachers and principals on state-mandated high-stakes tests. And finally--if there ever is a finally--I am angry at the racism that, despite having a president who is half white and half black, still permeates our America.

In my earlier days, I wrote about the problem of cultural conflict--that one of the reasons that having teachers and children of different cultural groups led to difficulties in teac.