The Education of Diane Ravitch
Will and Deni McIntyre/Corbis
By ALAN WOLFE
Published: May 6, 2010
THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEMAttending high school in Houston in the 1950s, Diane Ravitch came into contact with a teacher named Ruby Ratliff. A passionate lover of literature and a fierce editor of homework, Ratliff, following Tennyson, told Ravitch “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” The student evidently followed the teacher’s advice. Ravitch, a historian of American education and assistant secretary of education under the first George Bush, has long sought to find out what makes schools work. She has now found what that is, or at least what it isn’t: choice and testing. Her case against both is unyielding.
How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
By Diane Ravitch
283 pp. Basic Books. $26.95
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Ravitch was lucky to have Ratliff as her teacher — and we are lucky to have Ravitch as ours. Education was once considered purely a state and local matter. In the past 30 or so years it has become a national political football, with left and right fighting over various proposals, while nothing ever seems to get fixed. Meanwhile, many schools remain essentially segregated; how much you earn has a great deal to do with where you were educated; and even the best and brightest seem to know less geography and grapple with less history than when Ruby Ratliff discussed “Ozymandias” with her Houston class.
Ravitch’s offer to guide us through this mess comes with a catch: she has changed her mind. Once an advocate of choice and testing, in “The Death and Life of the Great