“I have never encountered politics as mean, nasty and personal as in ed reform,” said Ben Austin, who runs an advocacy group called Parent Revolution. He’s hardly a naïf: He led a communications team for the 2000 Democratic National Convention and spent five years in the Clinton White House. Yet Austin says he finds the bare-knuckle brawling of education politics both bewildering and depressing.
“The toxicity level is bizarrely high,” he said. “It would be funny if [the instigators] were bloggers sitting around in their underwear in tin-foil hats, but these are thought leaders in the field.”
Austin himself took a direct hit several months ago when Ravitch skewered him on her widely read blog, describing him as “loathsome” and writing of Parent Revolution: “There is a special place in hell reserved for everyone who administers and funds this revolting organization …”
Ravitch later apologized in a long public letter that spent 87 words repenting and nearly 1,700 running through all the reasons she considers Austin and his team to be heartless and destructive for organizing parents at a struggling Los Angeles school to oust the principal.