“I’m 87, this is not a good time for me to die because I have to stay and fight!” Diane Ravitch during our conversation on her new book, An Education – How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else. I had mentioned that the last chapter, Final Words were frank yet poignant. I should not have been taken aback by Ms. Ravitch’s decision to write so candidly. At the beginning of our meeting I eagerly announced to my esteemed guest how revealing the intimate details of her childhood and family were unexpected. Instead of dismissing my surprise she volunteered that writing explicitly about her life, especially the early years were essential to providing the reader a well-rounded picture of how she eventually came to change her mind about almost everything.
For many years, Diane Ravitch was among the country’s leading conservative thinkers on education. The cure for what ailed the school system was clear, she believed: high-stakes standardized testing, national standards, accountability, competition, charters, and vouchers. Then Ravitch saw what happened when these ideas were put into practice and recanted her long-held views. The problem was not bad teachers or failing schools, as conservatives claimed, but poverty. She denounced privatization as a hoax that did not help students and that harmed the public school system. She urged action to address the root causes of inequality. Ravitch shares how she came to hold conservative views and why she eventually abandoned them, exploring her switch from championing standards-based curriculum and standardized testing to arguing for greater investment in professional teachers and in public schools. Bringing together candid reflections with decades of research on education, Ravitch makes a powerful case for becoming, as she calls herself, “an activist on behalf of public schools.”
Diane Ravitch is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University‘s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, she was a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education. Her blog at DianeRavitch.net has received more than 36 million page views since she began blogging in 2012. Ravitch writes for the New York Review of Books. She married Richard Ravitch (who later served as Lieutenant Governor of New York) in 1960; they divorced in 1986. While her husband worked in the family business, she stayed home and raised three sons, the second of whom, Steven, died of leukemia aged two; his brothers went to private schools. Her longtime partner is Mary Butz, a retired New York City public school principal who also administered a progressive principal-training program. She and Butz were married on December 12, 2012.
