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Before I started teaching, I could explain, chapter and verse, why Diane Ravitch was wrong. Although Ravitch's scholarship was impeccable, she caused nothing but headaches for us true believers in educational progressivism. My complaints about Ravitch's demands for a content-rich curriculum disappeared after my first semester in the classroom. I quickly learned Ravitch was right, and that we can not build the bricks of conceptual understanding without the straw of knowledge.
A decade later, I was uneasy about Ravitch's, and my, support for NCLB. My better judgment said that the increased standardized testing would do more harm than good, but I was preoccupied with building bridges with the business community so I supported my union's willingness to give the new law a chance. At the time, I was frustrated with the professors emeriti who used the lessons of history to confidently (and it turns out, correctly) predict the failure of NCLB.
Then in 2007, I was reintroduced to Ravitch through the column, "Bridging Differences," which she shared with another educational hero, Deborah Meier. Nowadays, "reformers" complain that