Speaking Up for Diane Ravitch

By Thomas Ultican 1/17/2017

January 7^th this year, Diane Ravitch posted “STOP: Our Government Wants to Create a National Database about Everyone, Including YOUR Children.” As with many of Diane’s posts, she was amplifying the work of someone else. This time it was a post by Cheri Kiesecker at the “Missouri Education Watchdog.” It provided evidence about the dangerous loss of privacy facing American society – especially students. It highlighted the big money in datamining. I forwarded Diane’s post through Facebook and Twitter. Soon, that post was shared again on Facebook where it drew more than fifty mostly derogatory comments. Not about datamining or profiteering but about Diane Ravitch.

Attacking Public Educations Best Ally

The person who shared from my Facebook page wrote, “I stopped sharing any of Diane Ravitch’s posts but I had to share this one from Gretchen Logue ‘s blog from October 2016.” One comment read, “I stopped reading her blathering a while ago. To think she didn’t understanding what was being done until the latter part of 2016 is simply horrifying, her being a ‘leader’ in the education advocacy arena.” Another commenter impugned her integrity writing, “Diane has also promoted groups on her website that her sons company has major investments in… salesforce being one – and what do you think it’s mission is? Expansion of Digital learning.”

It seems that Diane’s mostly youthful and idealistic detractors charge her with not understanding that competency based education (CBE) is an existential threat to public schools and the teaching profession. I find this disquieting because I absolutely love what I see from some of these detractors. I see their passion for good, their skilled intelligence and their selfless dedication. I wonder why can’t they see that Diane Ravitch is their best and most important ally?

Outcome based education was one of those great education fads of the 1990’s and it was a total dud. Digital badging and students “learning” from software packages developed by Reed Hastings’ company are repugnant ideas. It is an attempt at profiting from education on the cheap. Is it possible that even wealthy corporate sponsors cannot continuously sell bad ideas? Abraham Lincoln is credited with saying, “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Possibly Diane Ravitch judges the privatization movement supported by standardized testing, charters and vouchers as a more imminent threat to universal public education? Diane and I are not close friends but I have met her a couple times and enjoyed enough one on one dialog to know that she does not miss much. It is unlikely that she is not aware of the CBE threat. It is likely she has not developed the same sense of urgency for the issue as some of her detractors.

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The trombone playing educator and philosopher from rural Pennsylvania, Peter Greene, gave voice to my feelings about attacks like this on Diane Ravitch:

“This is (one of) my problems with Movements– too often things descend into an argument about which people are pure enough, right enough, aligned enough, to deserve our loyalty or fealty. The Reformsters have had their ongoing sturm and drang about maintaining the coalition between left and right. On the public-school side, there are frequent arguments about whether or not certain figures deserve the respect they have, or should be cast out into the darkness because they haven’t taken the right position on A or X.

“I have never understood these arguments, these quests for purity. First of all, you know who sees the world exactly the same way I do? Nobody. Second, you know who in this world I give my unquestioning fealty and allegiance, whose word I will absolutely accept and follow, no questions asked? Nobody. You know who I expect to follow me without question and agree with whatever I have to say without debate? Also nobody. You see the pattern.”

Corporate Reformers and Fellow Travelers Take Aim

In December 2011, Kevin Carey who works for Education Sector, a think tank in Washington, wrote a lengthy biography and critique of Ravitch for the New Republic. The article paints a somewhat negative picture of Diane but it makes some interesting points. In discussing her becoming the face of the anti-corporate reform movement Carey theorizes:

“Ravitch was the perfect person to lead the resistance. Her identity as an academic gave her an implied expertise and impartiality; her government service gave her credibility. Added to this was the assumed integrity of the convert. In November 2010, she penned an influential critique of Waiting for Superman in The New York Review of Books, providing an intellectual blueprint for left-leaning critics of education reform. Jon Stewart invited her on “The Daily Show.” From there, it was a direct path to the “Save Our Schools” rally outside the White House. The die-hard reform opponents needed Diane Ravitch, and, in her own way, Diane Ravitch needed them, too.”

Diane routinely appears as a guest opinion writer in the most important newspapers and magazines in the country: The New Yorker, the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, etc. No other supporter of public education has near that access, but reformers like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Campbell Brown and many more have unfettered media access for their message.

Carey made two more points in his refutation of Ravitch that I found resonant with my own experience. Carey noted:

“MANY OF Ravitch’s former conservative allies declined to be interviewed for this article. She is, by all accounts, a warm friend who inspires strong loyalty and affection. She maintains a wry, level tone when speaking in public. And, although I had published a critical review of Death and Life, she graciously agreed to meet with me, and we had an amiable conversation over a two-hour lunch at an outdoor café.”

Carey’s article also reports on Diane’s important role in the conservative education reform community:

“In 1983, the Reagan administration published an iconic report titled A Nation at Risk, denouncing U.S. schools for lax academic standards. Ravitch was deeply skeptical of what she saw as the unstructured, relativistic ideas of progressives. She and Checker Finn, a conservative thinker (and, later, a Reagan official), formed the Educational Excellence Network to promote standards-based reform.

“Ravitch’s role in conservative education reform was not as a generator of ideas; others developed the framework of standards and market competition. Rather, she served as a kind of scribe who could communicate the movement’s agenda with clarity. Her arguments were mostly unconcerned with evidence—there was little at the time, since reforms like vouchers were largely untried.”

Carey concludes with his best attempt to demean and put Ravitch in her place:

“The most consistent thing about Ravitch has been her desire to be heard. In many ways, she has never left the cramped, argumentative office of The New Leader in the 1960s. Her genius was in the construction of a public identity of partial affiliation—a university-based historian who never wrote an academic dissertation, a former government official whose career in public service lasted less than two years, an overseer of the national testing program with no particular expertise in testing, and a champion of public school teachers who has never taught in a public school. She enjoys the credibility of the sober analyst while employing all the tools of the polemicist.”

Carey’s efforts to undermine Ravitch’s credibility are mild when compared with the tough piece written by Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute in City Journal. Stern’s attack is a throwback to McCarthyism:

“Another tenet of the far Left is that progressives should have “no enemies on the left,” and Ravitch apparently agrees. Thus, she has praised the former Weather Underground terrorist and radical educator William Ayers for his contributions to the anticorporate insurgency. (She concedes that Ayers made some political “mistakes” in the sixties.) Ravitch has also had kind words for leftist education activist and onetime Ayers ally Mike Klonsky. On her blog, she recounted visiting two universities in Chicago in 2010, with Klonsky as her host. “For me, the fallen-away conservative, it was a trip getting to know Mike, because he had long ago been a leader of the SDS, which was a radical group in the 1960s that I did not admire. So meeting him and discovering that he and his wife Susan were thoughtful, caring, and kind people was an experience in itself.” Ravitch apparently didn’t know, or preferred not to disclose, that Klonsky broke with Ayers’s Weather Underground faction to create a Maoist-oriented party in the U.S. and then spent several years in China during the horrific Cultural Revolution, attending state dinners with the Great Helmsman.”

One of the strangest attacks on Ravitch comes from Jim Horn, Professor of Educational Leadership at Cambridge College, Cambridge, MA., who has a blog, “School Matters.” Horn implies that Ravitch does not attack CBE and personalized learning as hard as he thinks she should because she is corrupt. This past August, Horn wrote:

“One has to wonder if she is aware that her son’s company could profit handsomely from some of those millions in federal seed money for turning children into alienated computer-compliant drones.

“What is clear is that the Ravitch team is always alert for any comment at her blog that could indicate Ravitch’s lack of understanding of an issue or any comment that would question her real commitment to the public education system that she claims to support.”

It is true that Ravitch’s son Joseph appears to be a successful banker. He left Goldman-Saks to form the Raine Group a few years ago and they appear to be doing well per this NY Times article. They are not focused on school profiteering but it would be difficult for an investment banking group not to have investments in a company that doesn’t have some connection to education technology, consulting, or publishing.

It is hard to fathom Horn’s dislike of Ravitch. Mercedes Schneider wrote about Horn taking a strange post charging Ravitch with being complicit in union busting to attack.

“When Horn read Carroll’s post and realized it provided an opening for him to attack Diane Ravitch, I wonder if he wet himself from glee. He launches right into Ravitch and her being paid by Pearson to speak at the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) convention in 2012 and of her receiving “her hefty speaking fee” as though Ravitch had been bought by Pearson. Horn assumes as much since he was unable to locate Ravitch’s speech online (his only link in his post other than a quote from The Hunger Games).

“Horn really did not want Ravitch to be paid by Pearson to speak. But she was, and she admitted it and added that she was “thrilled to be paid by Pearson to tell thousands of psychologists how lousy the standardized tests are.”

“Sounds fine to me. You see, I read Ravitch’s speech.

“The tone of Horn’s writing is such that one knows he wants Ravitch to be guilty of something. Surely her accepting “a fat payout” from Pearson to speak at NASP is evidence of the corruption he just knows is at her core, right?”

Diane Ravitch is Giving Voice to Educators

It was through Diane Ravitch’s blog that I learned of Jennifer Berkshire, Mercedes Schneider, Peter Greene, Jonathan Pelto, Carol Buris and a host of others. Any blogger who has had Diane link to their article knows about the “Ravitch bump.” With her large audience, Diane is amplifying wonderful voices who are fighting to save mandatory universal free public education.

Diane joined with Anthony Cody, Julian Vasquez Helieg and others to form the Network for Public Education (NPE). It was at the Chicago 2015 NPE convention that Mercedes Schneider told me how Diane reached out to her, convinced her to write a book and helped her find a publisher. Since then, Mercedes has written three important scholarly works detailing the big money interests with political power harming public education (Chronicle of Echoes, Common Core Dilemma, School Choice).

Diane has credited Debra Meier with convincing her that she was wrong about everything. Also, Ravitch notes John Maynard Keynes’s apocryphal quote: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’ When Ravitch first supported education reform ideas like standards and vouchers, there was no data. In her seminal book The Death and Life of the Great American School System Diane explained, “The more uneasy I grew with the agenda of choice and accountability, the more I realized that I am too ‘conservative’ to embrace an agenda whose end result is entirely speculative and uncertain.”

I am convinced that Diane is a lot more right than wrong. I did not agree with her about the Every Student Succeeds Act and I saw no reason to believe that Hillary Clinton would be anything but a misguided enemy of good public schools.

Yet, I still see Diane Ravitch as the greatest asset supporters of public education have.

Tags: CBE, Diane Ravitch, education, Education Reform, Privitization, Public education, Standardized Testing, Standards