About-face: A Conservative Rethinks Education Policy

About-face: A Conservative Rethinks Education Policy

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
by Diane Ravitch
Basic Books, 2010, 288 pp., $26.95

It’s fall 2007. Diane Ravitch is packing a career’s worth of reading and writing on public schooling in America into boxes: the time had come to repaint her Brooklyn home office, to reconsider the previous fifteen years she’d spent championing market-based reforms in education, and to sink into a full-blown intellectual crisis:

Ravitch faced this turning point after a fairly straight, forty-year trajectory in her field. She began writing about public education in the late 1960s with an article about interventions for failing students and an investigation into the explosive controversy over community control in the New York City school system. In the 1970s, she took on the left academics who argued that capitalist elites had used the public schools to shape the behavior and thinking of an emerging proletariat. For Ravitch public schools had played exactly the opposite role in U.S. history: they had provided the main opportunity for literacy and social mobility.

In the 1980s, she promoted higher curriculum standards while defending “the canon” against the postmodernists. She allied herself with conservative scholars; funding for her work at Columbia and New York universities came from conservative foundations, primarily the Olin Foundation. In 1991 Lamar Alexander, Secretary of Education under George H. W. Bush, asked Ravitch—a lifelong registered Democrat—to join his department. She accepted and served as assistant secretary in charge of the Office of Educational Research and Innovation for the last eighteen months of the administration.

During her Washington sojourn, Ravitch adopted the Republican playbook on education quickly, wholeheartedly, and, it seems, unthinkingly. She never offers a detailed explanation of how her reasoning changed; no studies persuaded her that imposing a business strategy on education would work—no such studies existed. When she does mention the subject, she uses passive constructions: “Having been immersed in a world of true believers, I was influenced by their ideas” or “In the 1990s, I f...