Diane Ravitch

Diane Silvers Ravitch (born July 1, 1938) 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. In 2010s she became "an activist on behalf of public schools". Ravitch writes for the New York Review of Books.

Ravitch was born into a Jewish family in 1938 in Houston, Texas, where she went to public schools from kindergarten through high school graduation. She is one of eight children. She is a graduate of Wellesley College and earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Ravitch began her career as an editorial assistant at the New Leader magazine, a socialist journal founded and supported by Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas. In 1975, she became a historian of education with a Ph.D. from Columbia University. At that time she worked closely with Teachers College president Lawrence A. Cremin, who was her mentor.

She was appointed to public office by Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. She served as Assistant Secretary of Education under Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander from 1991 to 1993 and his successor Richard Riley appointed her to serve as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which supervises the National Assessment of Educational Progress; she was a member of NAGB from 1997 to 2004. From 1995 to 2005 she held the Brown Chair in Education Studies at the Brookings Institution

She participated in a "blog debate" called "Bridging Differences" with Steinhardt School colleague Deborah Meier on the website of Education Week from February 26, 2007 until September 2012. She now has her own blog, Diane Ravitch's Blog.

In April 2012, Ravitch launched an education policy blog, posting up to ten times daily. She criticizes reformers "for backing teacher evaluations based on student test scores, closing failing schools, expanding charter schools, and trying to impose a 'nationalized' Common Core curriculum on the states, among other policies."

In 2013, she joined forces with a writer and former teacher, Anthony Cody, to set up The Network for Public Education which is a foundation dedicated to fighting against educational corporate reforms. Since President Trump appointed Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, membership in NPE has increased from 22,000 to 330,000.

Ravitch's first book The Great School Wars (1974) is a history of New York City public schools. It described alternating eras of centralization and decentralization. It also tied periodic controversies over public education to periodic waves of immigration.

Her book The Language Police (2003) was a criticism of both left-wing and right-wing attempts to stifle the study and expression of views deemed unworthy by those groups. The Amazon.com review summarizes Ravitch's thesis as "pressure groups from the political right and left have wrested control of the language and content of textbooks and standardized exams, often at the expense of the truth (in the case of history), of literary quality (in the case of literature), and of education in general." Publishers Weekly wrote: "Ravitch contends that these sanitized materials sacrifice literary quality and historical accuracy in order to escape controversy."

Ravitch's writings on racial and cultural diversity were summarized by sociologist Vincent N. Parrillo:

[Ravitch] emphasized a common culture but one that incorporated the contributions of all racial and ethnic groups so that they can believe in their full membership in America’s past, present, and future. She envisioned elimination of allegiance to any specific racial and/or ethnic group, with emphasis instead on our common humanity, our shared national identity, and our individual accomplishments.

Reading instruction

Ravitch said that she "supports the teaching of phonics when appropriate". She was critical of the then New York mayor Michael Bloomberg who, after taking control over New York public schools, replaced phonics with balanced literacy helped by Joel Klein, the then chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. Klein credited balanced literacy with raising the city’s fourth-grade reading scores. Ravitch rebutted that claim by noting that the rise in reading scores occurred in 2002—before Klein became chancellor and implemented balanced literacy.

At the same time Ravitch said that she could not bring herself to believe in "the science of reading". According to her, "there is no 'science of mathematics,' no 'science of science,' no 'science of history'".

School choice and testing

Being initially a proponent of No Child Left Behind, by 2010 Ravitch renounced her earlier support for high-stakes testing and school choice. She critiqued the punitive uses of accountability to fire teachers and close schools, as well as replacing public schools with charter schools and relying on superstar teachers. She wrote, "I no longer believe that either approach will produce the quantum improvement in American education that we all hope for." On her blog, she often cited low-performing charters, frauds, corruption, incompetent charter operators, exclusionary policies practiced by charters, and other poor results that diverted funding from public schools into private hands. High-stakes testing, "utopian" goals, "draconian" penalties, school closings, privatization, and charter schools didn't work, she concluded. "The best predictor of low academic performance is poverty—not bad teachers."

Ravitch said that the charter school and testing reform movement was started by billionaires and "right wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation," for the purpose of destroying public education and teachers' unions. She reviewed the documentary Waiting for Superman, directed by Davis Guggenheim, as "propagandistic" (pro-charter schools and anti-public schools), studded with "myths" and at least one "flatly wrong" claim. Of Education Secretary Arne Duncan's Race to the Top program, Ravitch said in a 2011 interview it "is an extension of No Child Left Behind ...[,] all bad ideas." She concluded "We are destroying our education system, blowing it up by these stupid policies. And handing the schools in low-income neighborhoods over to private entrepreneurs does not, in itself, improve them. There's plenty of evidence by now that the kids in those schools do no better, and it's simply a way of avoiding their - the public responsibility to provide good education."

Putting together her comments about the policies she had formerly espoused, Ravitch wrote The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Undermine Education (2010), which became a surprise best seller. One reviewer noted that "Ravitch exhibits an interesting mix of support for public education and the rights of teachers to bargain collectively with a tough-mindedness that some on the pedagogical left lack."

National standards and Common Core

During the 1980s, Ravitch began calling for voluntary national standards in education. She became associated with Core Knowledge movement, championed by E. D. Hirsch. During her stint as an assistant secretary of education, she was tasked to develop national standards, despite that the federal government could not require the states to adopt them. By 2007, Ravitch began changing her mind about the free-market components of education reform, but together with Hirsch kept demanding more attention to curriculum and instruction. In 2008 she became a co-chair of the board of newly created Common Core, Inc., which took upon itself the creation of the first American national standards in mathematics and English language.

In her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Undermine Education, published in 2010, Ravitch proclaimed:

Every school should have a well-conceived, coherent curriculum. A curriculum is not a script, but a set of general guidelines. Students should regularly enage in the study and practice of the liberal arts and sciences: history, literature, geography, the sciences, civics, mathematics, the arts, and foreign languages, as we as health and physical education.

She continued:

Nations such as Japan and Finland have developed excellent curricula that spell out what students are supposed to learn in a wide variety of subjects. If we are willing to learn from top-performing nations, we should establish a substantive national curriculum that declares our intention to educate all children in the full range of liberal arts and sciences, as well as physical education. The curriculum would designate the essential knowledge and skills that students need to learn.

In September 2010, Ravitch left Common Core, Inc., becoming disillusioned by the Common Core. The 3rd edition of the book, published in 2016, changed the tone accordingly:

In the original edition of this book, I expressed my view that the nation needs national standards. I thought that the culture wars of the 1990s are behind us. I believed that common sense would prevail and that professionals in every field could agree on the knowledge and skills that all citizens needed. I did not make any recommendations about national tests.

The fundamental error of the Common Core standards is that they were written by a small group of people without the involvement of classroom teachers and scholars in the respective fields. They were written with remarkable speed but without any public review process. There were no means by which to revise them after they were published. States could add up to 15 percent additional content, but could subtract or change nothing. It was a missed opportunity to do it right. The toxicity of the Common Core standards persuaded me that it is fruitless to rely on national curriculum standards as a solution to education problems.

Ravitch turned her attention to poverty and racial segregation, which she now considers the main causes of low student achievement. Ravitch claims that the Common Core "was a rush job, and the final product ignored the needs of children with disabilities, English-language learners and those in the early grades". She says that the country needs "schools where all children have the same chance to learn. That doesn’t require national standards or national tests, which improve neither teaching nor learning, and do nothing to help poor children at racially segregated schools".

She married Richard Ravitch (who later served as Lieutenant Governor of New York) in 1960 and they divorced in 1986. They have two sons; a third son died of leukemia at the age of 2.

Ravitch lives in Southold, New York. Her longtime companion is Mary Butz, a retired New York City public school principal who also administered a progressive principal-training program.

• Delta Kappa Gamma Educators' Award
• Ambassador of Honor Award, English-Speaking Union
• Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar, 1984–85
• Henry Allen Moe Prize, American Philosophical Society, 1986
• designated honorary citizen, State of California Senate Rules Committee, 1988, for work on state curriculum
• Alumnae Achievement Award, Wellesley College, 1989
• Medal of Distinction, Polish National Council of Education, 1991
• Literary Lion, New York Public Library, 1992
• Award for Distinguished Service, New York Academy of Public Education, 1994
• Horace Kidger Award, New England History Teachers Association, 1998
• Award of Excellence, St. John's University School of Education, 1998
• John Dewey Education Award, United Federation of Teachers, 2005
• Guggenheim fellowship, 1977
• Honorary Life Trustee, New York Public Library
• John Dewey Award, United Federation of Teachers, New York City, 2005
• Gaudium Award from the Breukelein Institute, 2005
• Uncommon Book Award, Hoover Institution, 2005
• NEA Friend of Education, 2010
• American Association of School Administrators, American Education Award, 2011
• Outstanding Friend of Education Award, Horace Mann League, 2011
• Distinguished Service Award, National Association of Secondary School Principals, 2011
• The Deborah W. Meier Hero in Education Award from FairTest, 2011
• Politico 50, one of the 50 people whose ideas are shaping our society, 2014
• Grawemeyer Award in Education for Death and Life of the Great American School System, 2014

Honorary degrees

• Amherst College
• Middlebury College Language Schools
• Ramapo College
• Reed College
• Saint Joseph's College (New York)
• Siena College
• State University of New York
• Union College
• Williams College