Last July, the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers’ union in the country, held its biannual convention in the vast, glum, glass-and-concrete Cobo Center, in downtown Detroit. In between general sessions, the teachers sat in small groups, and many of their discussions focussed on the amount of time that they have to spend preparing students for state tests mandated by the federal program No Child Left Behind, which President George W. Bush signed into law in 2002. N.C.L.B. is the centerpiece of the education-reform movement, which uses student performance on the tests to measure teachers and schools; it can lead to bonuses or firing for teachers and sanctions and even closure for schools. On the floor of the convention, a ninth-grade teacher named Don Brown, from Watsonville, California, stood up and said, “I’ve worked in a low-achieving school for twelve years. They have used these tests to hammer us, humiliate us.” Schools that are judged to be “low-achieving” often have large numbers of students from low-income families, or students with learning disabilities, or students who are still learning English. In the hall, teachers stood up one after another and said angrily that the tests do not fairly measure either learning or their abilities.
One of the speakers at the convention was Diane Ravitch. Now seventy-four, she has been a forceful voice in education debates for more than four decades. A research professor at New York University since 1995, she has taught at Columbia University’s Teachers’ College, served as an Assistant Secretary of Education, and edited education journals. She has written ten notable books on education history and policy. Most recently, she has written a series of scathing rebuttals of reform measures in The New York Review of Books and some two thousand posts on a blog she started in April, which has received almost a million and a half page views. Since the publication, in 2010, of her book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education,” she has barnstormed across the country giving speeches berating the reform movement, which, in addition to test-based “accountability,” also supports school choice and charter schools (public institutions that often receive substantial private funding and are free from many regulations, such as hiring union teachers in states that require it), and which she calls a “privatization” movement.
At the Cobo Center, Ravitch stood on a brightly lit podium at one end of the hangarlike hall. A friendly-looking woman of medium height, with short gray hair, she wore white pants, a white shell, a red jacket, and a glittery Mexican silver necklace. She spoke rapidly, in a dry, penetrating voice. “Public education is under attack by the forces of privatization, by people who make false promises,” she said, and “drain students and funding away from public schools.” She added:
At the beginning of the speech, many of the teachers were quiet; by the end, Ravitch had them on their feet, cheering.
Yet irony abounded in what she said. Less than a decade ago, she was one of the “they” she denounced in her speech. For years, Ravitch supported many reform goals—accountability, school choice, charters. But now that the ideas she championed have taken effect she is dismayed by the results and has disavowed her previous positions. Her disillusionment has been slow and painful and has ended some old friendships, but, she asked me, “how many people actually admit that they’re wrong?”
Ninety per cent of American students attend public school; there are currently fifty million students in the system. Federal, state, and local spending on education comes to more than six hundred billion dollars a year, about the same amount that is spent on defense. The debate over the future of education is partly about jobs, power, and money, and it has become caught up in the ideological struggle between government as a guarantor of community good and market-driven competition as a potential creator of excellence.
The reform movement has the support of President Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, who was previously the head of the Chicago public-school system and a major advocate of charters. It is also championed by the Republican Party; by many governors, mayors, and schools chancellors; and by a variety of wealthy entrepreneurs and fund managers, including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Whitney Tilson. It has changed educational thinking in states such as Florida, Wisconsin, and Louisiana, and in cities such as Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Charter schools have been established in forty states and now account for about five per cent of the nation’s public schools. More than two hundred of them are online charters, which receive public money but may be run for profit.
Not all reformers believe in the same measures, but there are certain common labels, perceptions, and goals. The movement is united by the assumption that, despite the existence of some great and many good schools, and despite the vast expenditures, American public education is in bad shape. The most widely known exposition of this view is the emotionally charged 2010 documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” a doleful representation of a system made up of complacent teachers, greedy unions, and frustrated parents. In the film’s account, charter schools are the only hope. Last summer, Michelle Rhee, who was the Washington, D.C., schools chancellor from 2007 to 2010, added a kind of facetious footnote to “Superman.” Rhee is now the head of a group called StudentsFirst, which opposes many of the priorities of teachers’ unions, especially tenure. The group produced, for the Olympics season, a nationally televised ad in which an out-of-shape man, with “USA EDU” printed on his shirt, stumbles about haplessly, unable to compete with education Olympians from other countries. Rhee introduced the spot on “Meet the Press.”
Most advocates of reform, however, are anything but facetious. Bill Gates has said that the public-school system is “obsolete,” and no longer produces enough technically qualified workers to allow America to compete internationally. As has been widely reported, in 2009 Americans scored seventeenth in science and twenty-fifth in math among students from thirty-four advanced industrial countries. A recent task force on education assembled by the Council on Foreign Relations, and headed by Condoleezza Rice and the former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, concluded that weak American performance amounted to a “grave national-security threat.”
The reformers’ insistence on test-based accountability and on parents’ being able to choose where their children are educated is an attempt to break up old patterns that they believe encourage mediocrity. When I spoke to Joel Klein recently, he noted that in New York “middle-class families know their way around the school system. They can generally find a school they like for their kids. Poor families usually have to put up with their neighborhood school.” Klein closed a hundred and ten schools with low test scores in his eight years as chancellor, from 2002 to 2010, and opened four hundred new schools—some of them made by dividing large schools into smaller ones. About a quarter of them were charters. Michelle Rhee closed dozens of schools and fired more than two hundred teachers in her three years in Washington.
In an article in the June, 2011, Atlantic, Klein said that the United Federation of Teachers (the New York branch of the A.F.T.) stopped him from making the slightest alterations in the way teachers conduct their duties. He, along with Whitney Tilson, who is on the New York board of the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter chain, and other reform advocates, has said that the unions—the National Education Association, as well as the A.F.T.—have put a stranglehold on education policy, and that they maintain it through their extensive support of the Democratic Party. Klein and the others want to see heavy revisions in teachers’ contracts, and would like politicians and school districts to pressure unions to accept them. They believe that lifetime tenure should be modified or abolished; instead, principals should have greater power to fire teachers, and without long due-process hearings, during which teachers are kept on salary. Pay should be based on merit, rather than on seniority. The slow accumulation of pension benefits—which keeps burnt-out teachers on the job for years—should be revised. Some believe that pay should even be “front-loaded,” with higher initial wages, to attract capable young people to the profession.
In opposing most of this, Ravitch has devoted her talks and writings to two major themes: first, that the long-held notion of public education as a sacred obligation to the American people has been undermined by an exaggerated negative critique of the schools. “American public schools as a whole are not failing,” she told me in Detroit. “High-school graduation rates are higher than ever”—up to 75.5 per cent, in 2009, the last year for which numbers are available. And she mentioned a slight increase, among all ethnic groups, in reading and math scores on national tests. She also disagreed with the interpretation of the notorious international tests. “We’ve never scored well on international tests, going back to the sixties, when they were started,” she said. “Yet somehow we built this fifteen-trillion-dollar economy. What is it that made us successful? If you want people to be creative and entrepreneurial, forget the test scores. It’s character that makes success.” She added, “Testing doesn’t close gaps—it reveals them.” She is not against state tests per se, but she thinks that “testing should be used for help—to diagnose learning problems—not as a basis for rewards and punishments.” Last February, she wrote on the New York Review blog:
The reformers, Ravitch believes, are mistakenly imposing a free-market ethos of competition on an institution that, if it is to function well, requires coöperation, sharing, and mentoring. Citing studies by universities, government agencies, and education-research groups, she insists that none of the current reforms have been successful. Instead, she says, reform is robbing the regular public schools of resources and intellectual strength. When a charter school opens, public money, along with motivated students and their parents, leaves the district school, making it weaker than before. She believes that the reformers, eager to do something quickly and decisively, are scanting the largest problem facing educators: the cyclical poverty that afflicts more than a fifth of the nation’s children.
Ravitch’s critics accuse her of contrarianism, even demagoguery. Arne Duncan, who received an “F” for his policies in one of Ravitch’s recent New York Review blog posts, told Jonathan Alter, of Bloomberg View, that Ravitch “is insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country, who are proving her wrong every day.” There is a Twitter feed, called NotDianeRavitch, which is devoted to countering her assertions. Steven Brill, the entrepreneur and journalist whose 2011 book, “Class Warfare,” was an impassioned brief on behalf of reformers and charter-school operators, has accused Ravitch of shilling for the unions.
Politically, Ravitch has journeyed from liberalism to neoconservatism, and now to what would have to be called the education left. I told her that some teachers I talked to in New York have never forgiven her for her earlier advocacy of N.C.L.B. and testing. She said, “I do get letters from people who say, ‘I can’t forgive you.’ I feel I have to make up for the damage I’ve done.”
Ravitch was born Diane Silvers, in Houston in 1938, the third of eight children in a middle-class Jewish family that venerated Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Her father owned liquor stores, in which her mother sometimes worked. Her mother was a high-school graduate, her father a dropout, but they both valued education. Ravitch graduated from San Jacinto High School and entered Wellesley in 1956. A college friend describes her as “the wild girl from Houston who climbed out of dorm windows after hours and challenged authority.” Ravitch majored in political science, and became the editor of the Wellesley College News.
During the summer of 1959, she worked as a copy girl at the Washington Post, and met Richard Ravitch, a twenty-five-year-old lawyer then working on Capitol Hill. They shared an interest in liberal politics and a passionate belief in the civil-rights movement. Two weeks after Diane graduated, in 1960, they were married. The couple settled in New York, where Richard began working for HRH Construction, a large firm owned by his family. (He went on to play a major role in New York State politics, running the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and serving as lieutenant governor, under David Paterson.) Ravitch recalls, “I was very young, very rough around the edges, very Texan, and very impressionable.”
In 1961, she started working as an editorial assistant at The New Leader, a liberal, anti-Communist biweekly. For Ravitch, the publication’s offices, on East Fifteenth Street, were the equivalent of the disputatious City College lunchroom alcoves that spawned an earlier generation of New York intellectuals. The magazine’s writers employed an argumentative and ideological mode of argument that, as the education writer Kevin Carey noted in The New Republic, may have permanently influenced Ravitch’s style. “A few months after I started work, there was a memorable debate about ‘the bomb’ between Erich Fromm and Sidney Hook,” she has written. “The best thinkers of the day opined on subjects they knew intimately—like Hans J. Morgenthau on Kennedy’s foreign policy, Theodore Draper on Castro’s revolution . . . Ralph Ellison on Irving Howe (and Howe’s response to Ellison).”
Diane and Richard had three sons. Joseph is now a partner in a merchant bank. Michael is a writer and co-edited, with his mother, “The English Reader” (2006), an anthology of British poetry and prose. Both boys went to private school, which Ravitch now regrets. “Was I weak? Yes. Was I trying to blend into the family tradition? Yes. Dick’s parents were both college graduates!” A third son, Steven, born between Joseph and Michael, in 1964, died of leukemia when he was two. The loss left Ravitch, as she has written, “with a sadness that will never heal.” Her friends remember that, at the time, she seemed aimless. “After a while, I knew I had to have a career,” she told me.
In 1967, she took a part-time job at the Carnegie Corporation, in which she reported on an ongoing experiment in school decentralization initiated by the Ford Foundation. The Board of Education and the U.F.T. had agreed to give a few New York City districts control over their own schools. One newly empowered school board, in the mainly black Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn, dismissed a group of teachers, many of whom were Jewish. The U.F.T. protested and, in the fall of 1968, led a series of strikes over three months that closed most of the city’s schools. For a while, the affair embittered relations between New York’s African-American and Jewish communities, and it helped push some prominent liberal Jews into neoconservatism. Ravitch played no part in the strike, but she had found her subject: the battle over public education, particularly the jostling of ethnic and immigrant groups struggling for success and social recognition.
No one, Ravitch discovered, had written a serious book about New York education in more than half a century. So she spent six years writing “The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools.” Published in 1974, the book is considered a classic. Ravitch organized it around several major clashes that shaped the system, including a crucial case during the First World War, when school reformers briefly put into practice ideas developed in Gary, Indiana, such as lengthening the school day and adding vocational training in mechanical and woodworking shops. In New York, unions, parents, and students opposed the Gary Plan; boys who were forced to give up paying jobs to go to afternoon classes rioted, destroying school property. But the strongest opposition came from immigrant Jews, who felt that the plan had been devised, at the behest of industrialists, to train children to be factory workers rather than to develop their interests and abilities. The revolt of these parents may have played a strong role in Ravitch’s thinking.
The philosopher John Dewey, writing about education from the eighteen-nineties through the nineteen-thirties, wanted students to be self-motivated researchers awakened to the possibilities of their own lives, not passive vessels waiting to be filled. In “Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform” (2000), Ravitch chronicled the misapplications of Dewey’s theories during periodic outbreaks of anti-intellectualism in both theory and school practice. There were, for instance, the Progressives, who, early in the last century, in anticipation of the Gary Plan, wanted schools to put away “bookish” studies—i.e., learning Latin by drills—in favor of vocational training. The problem with such ideas, she writes, is that, while they begin by attacking stultifying methods, such as rote learning, they wind up attacking the subjects themselves, which can be taught in more creative ways.
In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, more idealistic progressives, influenced by Rousseau as well as by Dewey, celebrated childhood as a state of natural wonderment; they focussed on school as a living experience, a place of freedom, where activities emerged from a child’s interests rather than from set academic subjects imposed on him. In Ravitch’s view, this strand of “child-centered” thinking, which claimed the support of psychological and cognitive research, and became widespread, thwarted intellectual seriousness and hard work.
One of the constants in Ravitch’s thinking, throughout its evolution, has been a demand for a rich, challenging, and varied academic curriculum—science, history, literature, and the arts—for all students. In part, the education debate now can be seen as a clash between Bill Gates’s technocratic notion of America’s needs—and an individual’s qualifications for employment—and Ravitch’s humanistic ideal of the well-rounded citizen.
In 1960, Ravitch volunteered for John F. Kennedy’s Presidential campaign, and in 1968 she joined the effort to persuade the antiwar left—which largely supported Eugene McCarthy—to vote for Hubert Humphrey. She staged a rally at the Manhattan Center that featured Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, and other liberal intellectuals. In the middle of the event, a group of Yippies burst into the auditorium, banging drums, carrying a North Vietnamese flag, and chanting, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh is gonna win!” Ravitch recalled, “A young man and a young woman sitting in the first row leaped to the stage, threw off their raincoats, and, buck naked, presented Galbraith with the head of a pig on a platter.” She added, “I knew then that Nixon would win, and that the Democratic Party was hopelessly divided and incapable of governing.”
Diane and Richard Ravitch, moving rightward, became friendly with Irving and Bea Kristol and Norman Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter, who were at the forefront of the neoconservative movement. “I wrote a few pieces for Commentary,” Ravitch said—about the 1968 strikes, among other topics. “I considered myself a neoconservative.” In 1977, she published “The Revisionists Revised,” in which she took on left-wing education critics. Writers like Michael Katz and Samuel Bowles believed that public schools were crushing the natural life—the spontaneity—out of students, and turning them into faceless workers for an industrial economy. One of the many ironies of Ravitch’s career is that what she ridiculed leftist critics for asserting in the sixties and seventies is essentially what she accuses the testing regimen of doing to students now.
In 1988, she published a book, with the conservative education scholar Chester E. Finn, Jr., titled “What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?” Their answer was: not very much. In 1991, Lamar Alexander, the former governor of Tennessee and, at the time, a moderate Republican, became President George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of Education. Alexander, who had become known for instituting merit-based pay in the Tennessee school system, was impressed with Ravitch’s demands for a strong curriculum, and he appointed her an Assistant Secretary. Up to that point, she hadn’t given much thought to issues like market-driven accountability, but she had become devoted to the idea of national standards—a basic model for what students should know at the yearly stages of their education. In the post, she met with governors and senators and spent a good part of her time flying around the country making speeches advocating standards.
The federal government is prevented by law, and by tradition, from setting a curriculum for all students. States, however, can voluntarily adopt standards, so Ravitch, at the Education Department, awarded nearly ten million dollars to groups of teachers and scholars to develop a voluntary national curriculum. She left the department after the 1992 election, and, two years later, Lynne Cheney, then the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, saw an early version of proposed American-history standards that had been developed by academics at U.C.L.A. through a grant that she had provided. Cheney denounced them as a left-wing “story of oppression and failure” and waged a successful campaign against them. The standards movement stalled, and remained so until 2009, when the National Governors’ Association asked a group of scholars and educators to come up with something called the Common Core State Standards. The standards, which require that all students read, for example, “Macbeth” and “The Grapes of Wrath” by the end of tenth grade, began to be implemented in 2010. So far, the education departments of forty-five states have chosen to adopt them. They should be in full force by 2014.
Throughout the nineties, Ravitch was affiliated with several conservative think tanks, including the Manhattan Institute; the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, headed by Chester Finn; and the Koret Task Force, at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, an élite research team devoted not only to creating standards but to promulgating market-based reforms. Ravitch is by nature a skeptic, but, in these years, she says, she took a “Why not?” approach. “The things I argued for in the nineties were speculative. They had not been tried. I had high hopes for assessments based on tests. I had high hopes for what charters might accomplish,” she wrote to me in an e-mail. “Why not accountability?” She agreed with Albert Shanker, the head of the A.F.T., who envisioned charters as a sort of laboratory, where new methods for educating low-performing students could be tried out and, if they proved successful, implemented at traditional public schools.
In retrospect, Ravitch believes that the reform movement took a catastrophic turn when test-based accountability began to dominate education policy. When George W. Bush became President, in 2001, he brought with him the “Texas miracle,” a policy of testing that, under the leadership of the Houston schools superintendent, Rod Paige, whom Bush made his Education Secretary, had produced a dramatic rise in math and reading scores.
In 2003, the Times compared the Texas claims with results obtained by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally funded test that is trusted, in part, because neither rewards nor punishments are attached to the results. The N.A.E.P. demonstrated that fourth-grade scores had been inflated. Nevertheless, No Child Left Behind was based on the Texas model. The law demanded a hundred-per-cent proficiency—meaning that all students must perform at grade level—by 2014, and it mandated a series of penalties, ending with closure, for schools whose students didn’t measure up. But Ravitch’s high hopes for N.C.L.B. and accountability did not produce the result that she had wished for. The constant test prep in reading and math, combined with state budget cuts, caused schools to increasingly ignore subjects such as history, science, languages, civics, and even gym. Some states claimed extraordinary results on their tests in the decade after 2000, results that were also shown by the N.A.E.P. to be inflated. Ravitch and others concluded that those states had been dumbing down their exams. “Anyway, no country in the world has ever achieved one-hundred-per-cent proficiency,” she told me. She feels that N.C.L.B., by setting up unrealizable goals, unwittingly launched the current narrative of education failure.
As states found themselves unable to meet N.C.L.B.’s requirements, the Obama Administration softened the law’s punitive mandates. It granted waivers to states that complied with provisions in the Administration’s own plan, Race to the Top, which was incorporated into the 2009 stimulus package. In a move widely praised by reformers, R.T.T.T. set aside more than four billion dollars to be divided among states that promised to allow more charter schools, and to add, as a way of grading teachers, Value-Added Modeling—the evaluation system that the teachers at the A.F.T. convention in Detroit objected to. VAM analysts look at a student’s scores and make a prediction about his scores for the succeeding year. If he does better than expected, the credit is given to the teacher; if he does worse, the teacher is blamed. The education-statistics expert Daniel Koretz, of Harvard, and the education analyst Linda Darling-Hammond, of Stanford, who was President Obama’s top education adviser in the 2008 campaign, both point out that many factors can affect students’ test performance, and that the tests do not exclusively measure a teacher’s impact. “Value-Added Modeling is junk science,” Ravitch says.
Throughout the decade, the reports on reform measures were, in Ravitch’s view, uniformly dismaying. A 2009 survey of charter schools across the country, conducted by Stanford, found that only seventeen per cent outperformed local public schools in math; forty-six per cent performed at about the same level; and thirty-seven per cent delivered “results that are significantly worse.” Some charter schools, especially in New York City, produced excellent results, but the N.A.E.P. tests in 2003 and 2006—and a 2010 study commissioned by the Department of Education—showed that the charter schools either underperformed, compared with district schools in the same demographic, or performed at about the same level.
Still, entrepreneurs and philanthropists see charter schools as an exciting new frontier. Charters can make the school day longer (up to nine hours), and add days during the summer. They can reduce class size, and, when they have extra money from private sources, furnish classrooms with the latest technology. Some of the best, like those sponsored by the KIPP program, steer inner-city students toward college from the early grades, and emphasize values such as perseverance and discipline as well as strong academics. Many of the young non-union teachers that the best charters hire make high demands on themselves and on their students. Yet Ravitch bristled when I relayed a remark about her that Whitney Tilson had made to me: “Any sane person would ask, ‘What can we learn from the success of the best charter schools?,’ rather than attack all of them.” Ravitch retorted, “Why can’t we learn from the regular schools that work?” She mentioned Brockton High School, in Massachusetts, twenty-five miles south of Boston.
In 2000, Brockton had about four thousand students, a third of whom dropped out before graduating. Several teachers got together and, with the approval of the principal, persuaded their colleagues to make students write constantly—not just in English and social-studies courses but in science and math courses as well. The steps of an experiment or the solution to an equation had to be written out, so that students would more clearly understand the logic of what they were doing. Even the gym instructors made students write down their class activities. The teachers were mostly unionized, and the local union did not oppose the effort. The students’ scores on state tests began to rise soon after the experiment began (though they rose more in reading than in math), and have remained high. A Harvard University study concluded that “achievement rose when leadership teams focussed thoughtfully and relentlessly on improving the quality of instruction.”
Such examples aside, Ravitch said, “We’re heading for a two-tiered public system, in which the best-motivated kids with the best-motivated parents are drawn off into the better charters, and everyone else is left behind in places that are increasingly underfunded, demoralized, and dysfunctional.”
By 2007, Ravitch had begun debating her think-tank colleagues, and, in October, she went public with a sharp op-ed in the Times, which said that N.C.L.B. wasn’t working. Eric Hanushek, an expert in the economics of education who was a fellow board member of Stanford’s Koret Task Force, pulled her aside at a lavish Hoover Institution dinner and told her that she was going “overboard.” By 2009, she had resigned from Koret, the Fordham group, and the Manhattan Institute.
More disappointment followed for Ravitch. She deemed idealistic but ineffective the Teach for America program, a favorite of the reformers, which recruits teachers from top undergraduate colleges. Each year, T.F.A., founded by Wendy Kopp, in 1990, gives a few thousand recruits five weeks of training, and then assigns them to schools in tough districts for two years. About half the recruits leave at that point, and after three years more than eighty per cent of them have left, according to the National Education Policy Center. The organization claims that more than sixty per cent remain in education—often as administrators or as charter-school teachers or operators. But T.F.A., Ravitch concluded, is not building a stable core of good teachers.
She also began to wonder what the pressures of the reforms were producing. The testing regimen demanded by N.C.L.B. had produced cheating scandals in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. In New York, Klein and Mayor Michael Bloomberg had claimed enormous improvements over the previous decade in reading and math scores. But, in 2010, an independent study commissioned by the state found that the tests had been made too easy, and the scores were drastically downgraded.
In Manhattan, private-equity companies had begun holding conferences to attract capital for investment in education. Education had become a place to make a lot of money, in software for testing and in for-profit charters. Speaking of the investment potential, Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation has an education subsidiary called Amplify, referred to education as “a five-hundred-billion-dollar sector.” In Ravitch’s view, education was turning to a business model that wasn’t producing better results than the old public-service model. She started chronicling her doubts and assembling her data for what became “The Death and Life of the Great American School System.” Her career as an anti-reform activist had begun.
Ravitch is not the only high-profile dissenter in education. Stanford’s Linda Darling-Hammond is as critical of reform initiatives as she is. Richard Rothstein, the former education writer for the Times and the author of “Grading Education” (2008), a critique of test-based accountability, told me that “the reform movement is destroying the public-education system.” Valerie Strauss, of the Washington Post, regularly opens her Web-based education column to teachers and principals to protest reform measures. Yet, if Ravitch has allies, she also finds herself politically isolated. Longtime Republican thinking about education has taken over the Democratic Party, which leaves her angry but undaunted. “My personal journey,” she says, “has been to rally the grassroots, to give them the information and the courage to believe not in what is politically necessary but in what they know in their heart is educationally wise.”
All sides in the debate agree that poverty presents the most severe obstacles to a child’s learning. The reformers say that since neither the will nor the cash exists at the federal level to effectively eliminate poverty, there is a moral imperative to do a better job of educating impoverished students. Joel Klein, who left the chancellorship in 2010 and now works for Murdoch’s Amplify, told me five times in an hour-long conversation that, unless the schools help students from “challenged” backgrounds, those students have little chance of surviving in a high-tech economy. “It’s a question of human dignity,” he said. “If you can’t get a job, you don’t have dignity.” Like other reform advocates, Klein believes that any educator who cites poverty as a reason for low student achievement is in danger of using it as an excuse—of saying, in effect, that poor kids can’t learn.
Ravitch says, “Poverty is not just an excuse. In some ways, the reform movement is in denial of the number of immigrant children, the hardening of class lines, growing inequality, the number of kids with disabilities. Some poor kids do very well, but the odds are against them.” Studies conducted by Stanford and the University of Michigan show that the achievement gap between rich and poor students has widened by as much as fifty per cent since 1980. By the time poor children reach kindergarten, after years of inadequate nutrition, limited reading at home, and little or no preschool experience, they are already at a disadvantage that is difficult to overcome.
In recent writings and speeches and in a forthcoming book, Ravitch argues for greater federal investment in prenatal and infant nutrition. “Some of the learning disabilities would never occur if babies were decently fed,” she said. We should also send more children to preschool programs and “open a clinic in every primary school”—she has called on Bill Gates to fund such clinics—so that students with asthma, high blood-lead levels, and other health problems associated with poverty, which often cause repeated absences from school, can receive treatment. “If we don’t invest in prenatal care,” Ravitch said, “we pay for it many times over with hundreds of millions or billions in special education. If we don’t pay for preschool programs, we pay for it many times over with remediation and other services.” A long-term study of African-American children begun in 1962, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, by High Scope Educational Research Foundation, found that children who attended preschool achieved better social and economic success than those who did not. Ravitch has pushed as well for greater resources to be directed toward regular district schools for smaller classes and better facilities.
Ravitch’s loyalty to public education is at the center of her identity, and even, as it turned out, of her personal life. In 1984, Ravitch met Mary Butz, who has worked as both a teacher and a principal in New York City public schools, at a conference in Minneapolis on the future of the humanities. A year later, Diane and Richard Ravitch parted, and in 1988 she and Butz began living together. She says, “Mary Butz was totally different from me and the world I inhabited. Catholic, from Brooklyn, a lifelong public-school educator, down to earth—with a great sense of humor.” Butz often travels with Ravitch, and in Detroit, when I met with them, she backed up Ravitch’s policy points with examples from her own experience in the New York schools.
Ravitch and Butz divide their time between a house in Brooklyn Heights and one on the North Fork of Long Island. In Brooklyn, Ravitch has an office on the fourth floor. Chairs and tabletops are covered with papers, articles, and books. Ravitch’s own books and articles, and journals she has edited, are stuffed into a tall bookcase. She says that the blog, which she turns to at least ten times a day, is “different from writing books. I’m writing from a place where brain and heart intersect.” Of her writing now, she says, “I’m not worried about whom I should sound like, whom I should appeal to. No one can fire me.”
We moved to the ground floor, and sat at the dining-room table. Behind us, glass doors opened onto a small back garden framed by neatly trimmed bushes. Ravitch wanted to talk about teachers. She remembers some of her own teachers in Houston with fondness, and through Butz has met many New York teachers and principals. “I know how difficult their lives are,” she said. “I am in awe of teachers because they can do what I can’t do. They can manage a roomful of rambunctious children. They can inspire. They are the bearers of our civilization.”
Steven Brill and Whitney Tilson say that Ravitch has been unwilling to criticize teachers’-union contracts. She declined to comment on pension issues, but agreed that it should be possible to fire incompetent teachers, after a review performed by “experienced principals and peers.” (She has also argued for tougher teaching-training programs.) At the same time, she defended tenure as important to academic freedom. “Without it, there will be huge parts of this country where evolution will never again be taught—or climate change, or anything that is in any way controversial.”
Ravitch points to low test scores in Southern states, where fewer teachers are unionized, and to states with high scores, like Connecticut, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, where schools are almost completely unionized. “Unions alone can’t be the problem,” she said. And the unions, she told The American Prospect, “provide a seat at the table when the legislature and the governor want to cut the budget. Texas has effectively gotten rid of that voice. Wisconsin has gotten rid of that voice.” She added, “In state after state, you have Republican governors killing the unions so that they don’t have to negotiate with anybody.”
When the teachers’ strike erupted in Chicago, on September 10th, negotiations broke down not over salaries but over Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s demand for more charter schools and for teacher evaluation and merit-based pay tied to students’ test scores. The strike ended on September 18th, after a series of compromises: the teachers defeated merit pay and got a raise; Emanuel would continue to open charters, and got a longer school day and an agreement that VAM scores would count for no more than thirty per cent of a teacher’s evaluation. On her blog, Ravitch congratulated the teachers. When she spoke in Detroit, Karen Lewis, the president of the Teachers Union, was in the audience. She views Ravitch as “the intellectual leader—and the intellectual soul—of the resistance to reform.” In some ways, Diane Ravitch has come full circle back to Houston. “I didn’t want to end my life as an enemy of public education,” she said. “I was a product of public education. Without the public schools, I would not be where I am today.”
Ravitch is cautious on another issue she has supported. In what is perhaps a reflection of her past experience, she is taking a tentative line toward the Common Core Standards. The standards “haven’t been field-tested anywhere,” she says—she would prefer a controlled experiment over a few years. She fears that they may prove too difficult for many schools to live up to, and that, like N.C.L.B., they could wind up reinforcing the narrative of failure.
At the moment, she’s more excited by signs of revolt. At the end of September, she returned to Texas to speak to legislators, school boards, administrators, and parents. A rebellion has been growing in her home state. Seventy-seven per cent of the school boards have passed a resolution opposing high-stakes testing. “Go, Texas, go!” Ravitch blogged. “If the testing vampire is slain, the whole façade of faux reform collapses. No test scores, no merit pay, no evaluation by test scores, no closing schools by scores.” Ravitch is convinced that the public, in the end, will realize that the reformers’ ideas aren’t working. Reaching the peroration of her speech in Detroit, she said, “There are cycles of history. Bad things don’t last forever. Bad ideas eventually are exposed. And when this dark era does end, as it will, be there to celebrate the collapse of this reign of error.”
At the end of my visit to Brooklyn, Ravitch told me, “I’m tired. I can only do this for a couple of years more.” I got on the subway for the ride back to Manhattan. When I arrived home, forty-five minutes later, I turned on my computer. Sixteen e-mails had arrived from Diane Ravitch since I left her house. ♦
