Burns makes that two pronged presentation online here. Read it. No paraphrase or quote, so go to the original.
Well, Ravitch agrees with the first part, judging from the report card she gave the gentleman. (Flunkin' Duncan).
Probably she'd take the job, if offered. First there is the detail of an ouster, however.
It is hard for me to suggest any "reform" of the education status quo. This is because I have no true expertise regarding education issues at K-12 levels, along with the belief that it is university post-graduate excellence that really matters and the big danger is we neglect that because of the politics of the grade school - a politics of parents with young children for whom they hope to see a prospering adulthood as feasible in an ever harder world for upward mobility to be grasped, in terms of social status and income where entrenched money talks out of proportion to the voice it might have.
That hopefulness makes those parents low-hanging fruit for the unprincipled among politicians, the snake oil salesmen, and are there any other kind when it comes to the bottom line nitty-gritty of vote counting being decisive? Politicians who are aloof or indifferent to the pressures of vote counting usually can be called ex-politicians.
Posturing gets press. How it is.This or that charter experiment, or the tiny trial prototype demonstration does not easily scale to levels of Anoka-Hennepin enrollment numbers, with class size limits imposed on budgets by those same hopeful and ambitious parents who want exceptional public education on the nickel but not the dime. It is a conundrum. (A polysyllabic way of saying between a rock and a hard place, and where some tiny band-aid approach that worked in some tiny cosmos of differing nature, one that cannot scale to realistic size and application, is nonetheless trotted out for purposes of political gain, or just for shaming or guilt-tripping our actual in-the-trenches teachers).
