Diane Ravitch argues in her book, Reign of Error, that American Education is not in an academic achievement crisis, but in a crisis where major foundations, billionaires, and Wall Street hedge fund managers are destroying public schools by encouraging the privatization of public education for idealistic reasons and profit. Ravitch discusses global, economical, and sociological issues such as the misconception of how we rank low on international test scores, the achievement gap and how poverty is a major factor of achievement levels despite reformers like Michelle Rhee who claim it shouldn’t be used as an excuse, some of the nation’s wealthiest businesspeople who believe that education should be run like a business, with efficiency, spreadsheets and bottom-line profits as the driving forces which stifle children’s creativity and potential.…show more content… These attacks serve the interests of those wealthy businessmen who want to privatize the public schools by creating a false sense of crisis. The headlines we read about how bad schools are, how bad teachers are, how important charter schools are, are not based on facts. She believes that blame should not be put on teacher and administrators and that higher standards should be set for teachers looking to enter the field. Reformers believe testing is the only way to assess accountability, but these elected and self-appointed education “experts” have lost sight of the diagnostic purpose of tests, and use test results to assert that our public education system is
