What Chafee may see – or at least used to – in Diane Ravitch
January 4th, 2012 at 6:00 am by Ted Nesi under Nesi's Notes, On the Main SiteEducation Sector’s Kevin Carey had a long and less-than-sympathetic profile in The New Republic recently looking at the career of Diane Ravitch, the iconoclastic education historian who’s influenced Governor Chafee’s views on K-12 reform. Ravitch has become a darling of the teachers unions for breaking with her former allies in the conservative movement on education policy:
When Ravitch first voiced enthusiastic support for private-school vouchers, they were largely untried. As she now observes, the results of long-term voucher experiments have been disappointing. Ten years after No Child Left Behind, a lot of children are still behind.
These are reasonable points. The problem is that Ravitch’s use of evidence to support her new positions is often dubious, selective, and inconsistent.
That excerpt gives you a taste of Carey’s critique. As I read the article, though, I found myself mulling one of the