In This Salon Interview, Diane Ravitch

spells out why we need to preserve the public education system which has helped to make this country so great but is now being dismantled and being encouraged by the WHITE HOUSE for reasons of ideology:

Yet why not create competition if the public schools aren't doing well? What about the mantra that my own school's principal says all the time about standards and test scores, that the "data doesn't lie"?

Has your principal heard of Ponzi schemes? Has he heard of Enron? The data lie all the time. Business lies all the time. It's easy to fudge the numbers. In New York, for instance, the Board of Ed dropped the passing mark for the tests. In 2006 a seventh-grade student needed to get 59.6 percent to be considered proficient. By 2009 the mark dropped to 44 percent. That produced a dramatic increase in "proficiency."

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You've lived and worked through countless moments of crisis in education. What makes this one different?

Public school has always had critics. But we now have for the first time a movement to eliminate public education. We have never in our history had a strong push to privatize a large piece of the public education system. And when you have it coming from the Oval Office, that's different.

Obama and Arne Duncan have completely aligned themselves with the Jack Welches and Joel Kleins. There's this idea that teachers are the enemy. Everybody has drunk the Kool-Aid, because if you want to keep your job, you walk the walk. It's doing a really good job of stigmatizing public education.