EdSight

Diane Silvers Ravitch is an American historian of education, public intellectual, and former federal education official whose work has both chronicled and altered the course of American schooling for nearly half a century. Born on July 1, 1938, in Houston, Texas, the third of eight children of Anna and Walter Silvers — small-business owners in the city's Heights neighborhood — Ravitch attended the Houston public schools and graduated as one of four valedictorians from San Jacinto High School, a comprehensive but racially segregated school of 1,200 students. She left the segregated South to attend Wellesley College, graduating in 1960 with a bachelor's degree in political science, and married Yale Law School graduate Richard Ravitch shortly after commencement; the couple had three sons, one of whom died of leukemia at the age of two. Ravitch worked as an editorial assistant at *The New Leader* from 1961 to 1966 and, inspired by the two-month New York City teachers' strike of 1968, began writing a history of the New York City public schools under the mentorship of Lawrence Cremin. She earned her PhD in history from Columbia University in 1975 and joined Teachers College as an adjunct assistant professor. From 1991 to January 1993 she served as Assistant Secretary in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement and Counselor to Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander under President George H.W. Bush; she subsequently held the Brown Chair in Education Studies as Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, served on the National Assessment Governing Board from 1997 to 2004, and taught at New York University until her retirement in 2020. She married her longtime best friend, the career New York City public-school educator Mary Butz, in 2012. Author of fourteen books, editor of eleven more, and writer of hundreds of essays, Ravitch is the cofounder (with Anthony Cody, 2013) and President of the Network for Public Education.

Ravitch's first major scholarly contribution was *The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805–1973*, published in 1974, a sweeping institutional history written against the advice of her mentor Lawrence Cremin, who had counseled her to start with essays rather than a book. The study examined the conventional belief that common schools served as engines of both social mobility and Americanization and argued that schools were indeed crucial to personal and social advancement, while family circumstance, poverty, and wider social policy shaped the fates of immigrant and Black children in ways schooling alone could not overcome. Four years later, in *The Revisionists Revised* (1978), Ravitch directly rebutted the then-ascendant radical historiography — associated with scholars such as Michael Katz, Colin Greer, and Joel Spring — which held that schools reinforced class and racial hierarchies by imposing social control on working-class children. She argued instead that American schools had in fact served a liberal mission, promoting social mobility and social progress, and in so doing anticipated the durable debate over whether equality of outcomes or equality of opportunity is the proper measure of a school system's success. *The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980* (1983) extended the argument chronologically, tracing the impact of postwar societal change on what public schools taught and whom they served.

• Ravitch, D. (1974). The great school wars: New York City, 1805–1973. Basic Books.
• Ravitch, D. (1978). The revisionists revised. Basic Books.
• Ravitch, D. (1983). The troubled crusade: American education, 1945–1980. Basic Books.
• Lagemann, E. C., & Graham, P. A. (1991). Lawrence A. Cremin (October 31, 1925–September 4, 1990): A biographical memoir. Educational Researcher, 20(5), 27–29.

Following the 1983 publication of *A Nation at Risk*, Ravitch joined Chester (“Checker”) Finn Jr. in founding the Educational Excellence Network, an organization that convened scholars committed to common standards, test-based accountability, and a basic curriculum. With a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, the pair commissioned an NAEP survey of high-school students' knowledge of history and literature, publishing the results as *What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?* (1988) — a book widely used by conservatives to advance the “failing schools” narrative. At Brookings, Ravitch wrote *National Standards in American Education: A Citizen's Guide* (1995), which made a nuanced case for federal, state, and local collaboration on standards while insisting that standards and assessments alone could not secure improvement without a supportive cultural shift. During this period she served on the board of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and as a founding member of the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution alongside Finn, Paul Peterson, John Chubb, Terry Moe, E. D. Hirsch Jr., Caroline Hoxby, and Eric Hanushek, writing in advocacy of charter schools and high-stakes testing and testifying in 1998 before the New York legislature on behalf of the state's charter school law.

• Ravitch, D., & Finn, C. E. (1988). What do our 17-year-olds know?: A report on the first national assessment of history and literature. HarperCollins.
• Ravitch, D. (1995). National standards in American education: A citizen's guide. Brookings Institution Press.
• Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. (2002). Five-year report: 1997–2001.
• Ravitch, D. (2000). Left back: A century of battles over school reform. Simon & Schuster.
• Ravitch, D. (2003). The language police: How pressure groups restrict what students learn. Knopf.

Ravitch's most consequential single work — and the one that defines her in contemporary debate — is *The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Undermine Education*, published in 2010. The book marked her public break with twenty-five years of advocacy for test-based accountability, charter schools, and market-style reform. Its origins lay in a series of disillusionments accumulated between 2006 and 2009: the admission in Koret Task Force meetings that most Fordham-sponsored charters were failing; a late-2006 American Enterprise Institute conference at which every presenter acknowledged that high-stakes test accountability was not working; a site visit to San Diego, which Joel Klein had named as his inspiration, where Ravitch found that Alan Bersin's reforms had produced distrust and punitive practice rather than improvement; and extensive conversations with Class Size Matters executive director Leonie Haimson. Ravitch resigned from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the Hoover Institution in 2009 and used the book to coin the influential phrase “the billionaires' boys club,” describing how wealthy donors such as Bill Gates, the Waltons, Michael Bloomberg, and Eli Broad were imposing business principles on public schools. The book was a national bestseller and earned the NEA's “Friend of Education” award, the Charles W. Eliot Award from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, the Outstanding Friend of Education Award from the Horace Mann League, the American Education Award, the NASSP Distinguished Service Award, the Distinguished Alumni Award from Teachers College, the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2011), and the Grawemeyer Award (2014).

• Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice undermine education. Basic Books.
• Levine, J. (2017, Spring/Summer). The education of Diane Ravitch. Teachers College Columbia University.
• Shemo, D. (2008). Wonder wonk unmasked. New York Magazine.
• Schmidt, G. (2010). Diane Ravitch spoke to the NEA while the AFT was waiting for Bill Gates to shower millions on it. Substance News.

In *Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools* (2013), Ravitch took up the factual claims on which the privatization movement rested and refuted them point by point. The book does not deny the need for improvement in public education but argues that claims of widespread failure are fallacious, that the primary causes of low scores are not “bad teachers” but a “toxic mix” of segregation and poverty — an argument that reaches back to *The Great School Wars* — and that urban systems with low scores require full-service community schools, experienced teachers, small classes, and intense resource investment rather than school closure and privatized choice. *Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America's Public Schools* (2020) chronicled the grassroots movement of teachers, parents, unions, and journalists that had formed around her critique, and *EdSpeak and Doubletalk* (2020), co-authored with Nancy E. Bailey, offered a glossary for decoding the euphemisms of corporate reform.

1. Three central claims: American public schools are not in general failure; school choice benefits a narrow stratum and harms the rest; and the real drivers of low test scores are segregation and poverty rather than teacher quality.

2. Three proposed remedies: full-service community schools, investment in experienced teachers and small classes, and democratically governed public systems rather than privatized marketplaces.

• Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to America's public schools. Knopf Doubleday.
• Ravitch, D. (2020). Slaying Goliath: The passionate resistance to privatization and the fight to save America's public schools. Knopf Doubleday.
• Ravitch, D., & Bailey, N. E. (2020). EdSpeak and doubletalk: A glossary to decipher hypocrisy and save public schooling.

In 2013, Ravitch and retired Oakland teacher Anthony Cody co-founded the Network for Public Education (NPE), a nonprofit designed to defend democratically governed public schools during a period of concerted political and philanthropic pressure. Under Ravitch's presidency the organization has grown to approximately 350,000 followers and coordinates more than 100 national and local pro-public-education groups, issuing a series of influential research reports — two grading states on their commitment to democratically governed public schools, and four on problems inherent in charter schools — that have shaped journalism, public opinion, and government oversight. Ravitch also pioneered the use of daily, long-form blogging as a form of public scholarship: her blog, launched in 2012 and sometimes posting five times a day, has exceeded 39 million views, and her Twitter presence of over 155,000 followers has amplified both her own voice and those of teachers, parents, and researchers opposing high-stakes testing, school closures, and privatization. Her late-career friendship with Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis, begun during an impromptu four-hour airport conversation between Detroit and Los Angeles, was one of many alliances she forged with union leaders, parents, and classroom teachers during her post-2010 speaking tours.

• Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system. Basic Books.
• Network for Public Education. (various reports on charter schools and state public education).
• Levine, J. (2017, Spring/Summer). The education of Diane Ravitch. Teachers College Columbia University.

What distinguishes Ravitch from most historians of education is that she has been, in the words of Teachers College's Joe Levine, both a chronicler and a principal actor in the history she studies. Her career has moved, in Levine's phrase, “from left to right and back again,” and the resulting body of work fuses meticulously detailed reporting with unabashed statements of opinion and autobiographical reflection — a historicism that Levine compared to that of Joan Didion, early Gloria Steinem, and Jonathan Kozol. Ravitch's willingness to reverse her position publicly, at significant cost in longstanding professional friendships, has itself become an object lesson in how educational policy communities respond to disconfirming evidence. Her conversations over the 2007–2017 blog debate with Deborah Meier on *Education Week* are frequently cited as a model of public deliberation across political difference, and her shift contributed to the fall in popularity of the Common Core, the increased scrutiny of test-based accountability, and the growing recognition of privatization as a threat to democratic governance of schools.

• Levine, J. (2017, Spring/Summer). The education of Diane Ravitch. Teachers College Columbia University.
• Schmidt, G. (2010). Diane Ravitch spoke to the NEA. Substance News.
• Meier, D., & Ravitch, D. (2007–2017). Bridging Differences [Education Week blog].

• Ravitch, D. (1974). The great school wars: New York City, 1805–1973. Basic Books.
• Ravitch, D. (1978). The revisionists revised. Basic Books.
• Ravitch, D. (1983). The troubled crusade: American education, 1945–1980. Basic Books.
• Ravitch, D. (1985). The schools we deserve.
• Ravitch, D., & Finn, C. E. (1988). What do our 17-year-olds know?: A report on the first national assessment of history and literature. HarperCollins.
• Ravitch, D. (1995). National standards in American education: A citizen's guide. Brookings Institution Press.
• Ravitch, D. (2000). Left back: A century of battles over school reform. Simon & Schuster.
• Ravitch, D. (2003). The language police: How pressure groups restrict what students learn. Knopf.
• Ravitch, D. (2007). EdSpeak: A glossary of education terms, phrases, buzzwords, and jargon. ASCD.
• Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice undermine education. Basic Books.
• Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to America's public schools. Knopf Doubleday.
• Ravitch, D. (2019). The wisdom and wit of Diane Ravitch.
• Ravitch, D. (2020). Slaying Goliath: The passionate resistance to privatization and the fight to save America's public schools. Knopf Doubleday.
• Ravitch, D., & Bailey, N. E. (2020). EdSpeak and doubletalk: A glossary to decipher hypocrisy and save public schooling.
• Lagemann, E. C., & Graham, P. A. (1991). Lawrence A. Cremin (October 31, 1925–September 4, 1990): A biographical memoir. Educational Researcher, 20(5), 27–29.
• Levine, J. (2017, Spring/Summer). The education of Diane Ravitch. Teachers College Columbia University. https://www.tc.columbia.edu/articles/2017/june/the-education-of-diane-ravitch-/
• Schmidt, G. (2010). Diane Ravitch spoke to the NEA while the AFT was waiting for Bill Gates to shower millions on it. Substance News.
• Shemo, D. (2008). Wonder wonk unmasked. New York Magazine. https://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/49527/
• Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. (2002). Five-year report: 1997–2001. https://www.edexcellencemedia.net/publications/2002/200205_tbfffiveyear/report.pdf