Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch have finally started their blog Bridging Differences. It should be an interesting and readable conversation.
Update: One commenter writes, “I thought Michael [B.] Katz hated Ravitch–well, he trashed her scholarly work, anyway. Isn’t she out of favor now?”
Yes, I’m a former Michael Katz student (Michael Katz, the historian of education at Penn, not Michael Katz the philosopher of education at San Jose State). (More on this and why I’m a history-education half-breed at another time.) And since this has come up, I’ll talk about my views of Ravitch’s most recent history of ed book in an entry later tonight. But I don’t have to agree with someone’s scholarship to welcome them to a conversation, especially if it’s in the form of a dialog with Deborah Meier. One fact is obvious: Regardless of various professional views of her scholarship, Ravitch is a recognized voice on education policy. There are plenty of people I correspond with who have fewer claims to expertise, so I can either have a snit-fit about that or deal, and at this point, having a snit-fit is darned close to sexism and uber-testosterone in education policy studies.