The Dissenter | The New Republic

What happened when the education world's most prominent intellectual switched sides.The Dissenter | The New Republic


Now, pundits, scholars, philanthropists, and education leaders are all asking the same question: What happened to Diane Ravitch?

The gray-haired woman walked to the microphone as the crowd chanted, “Diane! Diane!” “This is a historic day. I’m a historian,” she told them. She spoke for only eight minutes, in short, punchy sentences. “Carrots and sticks are for donkeys.” “Education is a right, not a race.” “Our problem is poverty, not our schools.” When she finished, the crowd began chanting again: “Thank you! Thank you!” 

It was, historically speaking, a strange place for Diane Ravitch to be. There was no indication that, until recently, she had championed many of the policies that were denounced at the rally as tools of racism and oppression. That she had spent years in the inner circle of conservative education policy, advocating for school vouchers, firing incompetent teachers, and shutting down failing schools. Ravitch once assured the public, “Vouchers and charters will not destroy public education. This is an incredible and fantastical fear.” Now she says things like, “Vouchers are a con, intended to destroy public education.”

In 2000, Ravitch, seemingly anticipating just such a consensus, argued: “If we found that there is no difference in performance between charter schools, voucher schools, and regular public schools, it would not be a victory for the status quo. Instead, we would have to say that the choice of school belongs to the parent.” Now that the overall research consensus matches this scenario, Ravitch focuses repeatedly on the Stanford study, asserting that it proves charters have failed.

Her genius was in the construction of a public identity of partial affiliation—a university-based historian who never wrote an academic dissertation, a former government official whose career in public service lasted less than two years, an overseer of the national testing program with no particular expertise in testing, and a champion of public school teachers who has never taught in a public school. She enjoys the credibility of the sober analyst while employing all the tools of the polemicist.