The Mystery of Diane Ravitch

In a new memoir, the fiery education advocate tries to explain why she renounced almost everything she once believed.

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For years, some education reformers have wondered “what happened” to Diane Ravitch. Her new memoir offers up intriguing tidbits but doesn’t provide a definitive answer.

For those who aren’t familiar with Ravitch, she came to prominence beginning in the 1980s as an advocate of charter schools, rigorous academic standards, and high-stakes tests tied to those standards—the keystones of the education reform movement of the late 20^th and early 21^st century. But in her late sixties, she had a radical change of heart, fiercely denouncing those very policies.

At the age of 87, she is now a revered figure among those on the left who share her current views—not only forgiven for her previous transgressions but celebrated for having the courage to admit the error of her ways. Meanwhile, her former comrades-in-arms in the conservative wing of the education reform movement are still scratching their heads about her transformation.¹

I’ve been curious about it too, but for somewhat different reasons. Before she became an education activist, Ravitch was an education historian—and a critic of the “progressive” education philosophy that has dominated schools of education for the past century, albeit under different names.²

Generally speaking, that philosophy has frowned on the idea that a teacher should stand in front of a class and impart information. Rather than being the “sage on the stage,” the saying goes, a teacher should be a “guide on the side,” facilitating students’ ideally self-directed journeys of inquiry and discovery. When researching my book The Knowledge Gap, I drew heavily on Ravitch’s accounts of the history of this approach both for an overall understanding of education orthodoxy and for anecdotes illustrating its foibles.³

Content-Rich Curriculum

In her earlier incarnation, Ravitch was also a strong advocate for content-rich, knowledge-building curriculum. She played a key role in encouraging E.D. Hirsch, Jr., to write Cultural Literacy, the 1987 best-seller that identified schools’ failure to build students’ knowledge as a fundamental cause of education inequity.

Hirsch’s insight was that students from more highly educated families were better able to acquire the academic knowledge and vocabulary that enabled reading comprehension. By imparting that kind of knowledge to all students, Hirsch argued, schools could significantly level the playing field. But largely as a result of progressive education orthodoxy, they focus instead on trying to teach “thinking skills” that can’t actually be taught in the abstract. That approach only exacerbates existing inequalities.⁴

Hirsch established a foundation that has developed several content-rich curricula, the best-known of which is Core Knowledge Language Arts, or CKLA, an elementary literacy curriculum that incorporates topics from history and science. For a while, Ravitch served on the board of Hirsch’s foundation. She also wrote an article debunking the idea—long widespread among educators—that teaching subjects like history to young children is “developmentally inappropriate.”

But after her change of heart, she wrote a blog post ridiculing a first-grade CKLA unit on “Early World Civilizations” because it expected students to learn to do things like “identify cuneiform as the system of writing used in Mesopotamia” and “explain the importance of the Nile River.”

“When I read this curriculum,” Ravitch wrote in her post, “the first thought that occurred was that this is developmentally inappropriate.” She was “a strong believer in knowledge and content,” but, she declared, first-graders couldn’t possibly be mature enough to understand these concepts. Without that understanding, “all this content is a circus trick, an effort to prove that a six-year-old can do mental gymnastics.”

Around the time I read that blog post, I was observing a classroom in a school serving a low-income population that, as luck would have it, was teaching that same Early World Civilizations unit. I was watching six-year-olds absorb and understand these concepts—not at the level of, say, a college student, but in an age-appropriate way.

The following school year, I watched the same children rely on what they had learned about ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to understand three other ancient civilizations.⁵ If it was a circus trick, someone forgot to tell those kids—although they seemed to be enjoying acquiring all this knowledge just as much as they would have enjoyed learning circus tricks.

For me, the mystery of Diane Ravitch is why she would turn her back on giving children access to the kind of knowledge that could enable them to succeed in school and in life—apparently without visiting any classrooms that were actually trying to do that.

Nothing New on Education

Alas, the new memoir, to be published October 21, doesn’t provide the answer. The subtitle is How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else (the main title is An Education)—so you could say the book never promises to explain why, only how.

The chapters I found most interesting were those related to Ravitch’s childhood as a scrappy tomboy in a large Jewish family in Houston, with a ne’er-do-well father and a hard-working mother. Ravitch’s accounts of her early marriage to the scion of a wealthy New York family—a husband she loved but found domineering—and the loss of a toddler son to leukemia were riveting and affecting. But for anyone who has read some of the books, articles, and many blog posts she’s written since 2010, the chapters explaining her changed views on education add little that’s new.

Ravitch is proud of her willingness to change her mind when she sees that her beliefs don’t work in practice, and that pride is justified to some extent. But in the process of changing her mind, she has abandoned nuance in favor of blanket condemnation and take-no-prisoners rhetoric, attacking her perceived opponents with the zeal of a convert.

Questioning Beliefs Is Fine, But …

I’ve taken a version of Ravitch’s journey, in a less public way, but we haven’t ended up in the same place. When I started getting interested in education, I was taken under the wing of education reformers who convinced me that charter schools and high-stakes standardized tests were the sure-fire formula for creating equity. Like Ravitch, I came to question those beliefs when I saw they weren’t achieving the promised results.

But it’s possible to doubt that charter schools will solve our education problems without seeing the whole sector as a right-wing plot to privatize the education system—which is Ravitch’s position. She seems to deny the possibility that those funding and promoting charters sincerely believe they’re helping disadvantaged students—or that any such students have benefited from attending a charter school.

Similarly, it’s possible to believe that some academic standards make no sense without jettisoning the very concept of such standards—and to see the Common Core standards as a well-intentioned effort that fell short rather than as nothing more than a self-serving conspiracy by well-heeled funders, a group that Ravitch has dubbed the Billionaire Boys’ Club. (She does have a way with epithets.)

And it’s possible to see standardized test scores as reflections of socioeconomic status without arguing that’s all they can ever measure. It’s true that in our current system that’s largely what they measure, but if curriculum and instruction were aligned with cognitive science, the situation might well be different. Schools can’t entirely level the playing field, but we have evidence that by systematically building knowledge they can do a lot more than they’re doing now.

No Education Crisis

Generally, Ravitch seems unaware of the ways in which the typical American approach to education contradicts what science tells us about how children learn, condemning many students to failure. In fact, she argues that there really is no education “crisis” (her scare quotes).

Wealthier students are doing fine, she says, and the challenges confronted by the others are entirely due to poverty. Therefore, she claims, the only way to address those challenges is to address poverty—overlooking evidence that the explicit, knowledge-focused teaching methods long abhorred by ed school faculty are particularly helpful for disadvantaged students.

In Ravitch’s view, there’s nothing wrong with American education except the efforts of reformers to meddle in it. She objects to “any state or district mandates that tell teachers how to teach,” including mandates to teach phonics. Teachers, she says, should be free to rely on their own judgment.

Certainly there’s a role for teachers’ judgment, just as there’s a role for the judgment of doctors in treating their patients. But no one claims that doctors should be free to treat patients in any way they choose, regardless of what science indicates will work.

Ravitch’s position also ignores the fact that many thousands of teachers feel seriously unprepared by their training and are desperate for guidance in the classroom. And it’s not as though everything was fine before the modern education reform movement came along, especially for students in historically disadvantaged groups.

Ravitch’s argument that “there’s nothing to see here” rings particularly hollow at a time when even students at the upper end of the socioeconomic spectrum are struggling to understand complex texts—and employers report that high school graduates at the lower end lack basic skills. Practices in K-12 education have a lot to do with those problems, and thoughtful, evidence-based changes could address them.

Ravitch clearly possesses a talent for rallying people behind her. It’s unfortunate that in the last fifteen years she hasn’t deployed that talent in a way that could have led to a shift not only away from reforms that haven’t worked but also toward some that could—including some that she herself once helped identify.

1. Ravitch characterizes her former positions as “conservative” and presumably Republican, but plenty of Democrats have advocated for the same policies—including Barack Obama. For a while, education reform was unusual in being a truly bipartisan movement.

2. It’s also been called “constructivist,” and in its most recent incarnation, more or less, it’s known as the “sociocultural” model or framework, as opposed to a “cognitive” one. Some educators deny that “progressive education” is even a thing, but whatever you call it, the basic tenets get communicated to prospective teachers.

3. Here’s a sample anecdote, drawn from Ravitch’s book The Troubled Crusade: During a fad for “open classrooms” in the 1970s, a progressive urban school serving a mostly Black student body introduced the no-walls model. It soon produced chaos. “You have had a certain kind of educational experience,” one parent told a progressive teacher, “teacher as source of knowledge and control, child as respectful and obedient responder, and you made it. If our children have the same kind of educational experience, they too will make it.”

4. I’m indebted to Ravitch for encouraging Hirsch because I’ve drawn on his thinking in Cultural Literacy and his other books in writing my own books. The emphasis on supposed skills at the expense of content and knowledge-building has only gotten worse since 1987.

5. For example: When the class was studying ancient Greece in second grade, the teacher asked students to name something unique about ancient Greek civilization as compared to the other ancient civilizations they had studied. Eager hands flew up, and the teacher called on a boy from a Spanish-speaking family. I recorded his answer, which was, verbatim: “Something unique was that they weren’t near a river and they didn’t have any fertile soil, so it was difficult for them to farm.”