In Response to @MattYglesias: How Would an Education Progressive Run a School District?
In response to my Ravitch profile, Matt Yglesias has written a characteristically pointed post asking, "What does Diane Ravitch think we should do to improve education in the United States," and answering, "I have no idea."
I obviously cannot speak for Ravitch, but I can point to a few things she's written and said on this question, and offer some of my own thoughts.
This past Monday, Ravitch tweeted the following: "I wish KIPP would take over a complete urban district so people would stop suspecting them of skimming, attrition." This gives a hint as to what Ravitch would do if she were an urban superintendent. She respects KIPP's focus on providing disadvantaged students with a traditional academic curriculum and a structured day, but she is curious to know if the high test scores that follow are transferable to all poor children, not just the ones whose parents are motivated enough to enroll them in a lottery.
I think that as a superintendent, Ravitch would hire principals who really care about what students learn in a
Notes on my New Profile of Diane Ravitch
The cover story of this week's Washington City Paper is my longish profile of Diane Ravitch, the leading education historian and former George H.W. Bush appointee who, in recent years, has switched sides from standards-and-accountability reform to progressivism.
Ravitch has led a very full and interesting life. She grew up in Texas, where she was a teen drag racer, and got her start in journalism at The New Leader, a democratic socialist magazine. Tragically, she lost a son to leukemia in the 1960s, which contributed to her lack of sympathy toward the counterculture, which she believed had too much contempt for valuable cultural institutions. A friend of Al Shanker's, in the late 1980s Ravitch visited the newly-liberated countries of Eastern Europe to speak to nascent teachers' unions.
Ravitch gets a lot of attention for changing her mind on issues like testing and charter schools, but on some other questions, she has been quite consistent. She's always been a defender of teacher professionalism and a critic of the idea that teachers alone are to blame for failing schools. She's always been wary of the outsized