Diane Ravitch

"The Language Police" redirects here. For entities referred to by that term, see Language police.

Diane Ravitch
Born	Diane Silvers (1938-07-01) July 1, 1938 Houston, Texas
Residence	Southold, New York
Nationality	United States
Education	Wellesley College, B.A., 1960 Columbia University, Ph.D., 1975
Employer	Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development (NYU)
Parent(s)	Walter Cracker Silvers (businessperson) Ann Celia (Katz) Silvers (businessperson)
Awards	See awards section
Website	www.dianeravitch.com
Notes

Diane Silvers Ravitch (born July 1, 1938) is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, she was a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education.

Early life and education

Ravitch was born into a Jewish family in 1938 in Houston, Texas, where she went to public schools from kindergarten through high school graduation. She is one of eight children. She is a graduate of Wellesley College, has a Ph.D. from Columbia University. She married Richard Ravitch (who later served as Lieutenant Governor of New York) in 1960 and they divorced in 1986. They have two sons; a third son died of leukemia at the age of 2.

Ravitch lives in Southold, New York. Her longtime companion is Mary Butz, a retired New York City public school principal who also administered a progressive principal-training program.

Career

Ravitch began her career as an editorial assistant at the New Leader magazine, a small journal devoted to democratic ideas. In 1975, she became a historian of education with a Ph.D. from Columbia University. At that time she worked closely with Teachers College president Lawrence A. Cremin, who was her mentor.

She was appointed to public office by Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. She served as Assistant Secretary of Education under Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander from 1991 to 1993 and his successor Richard Riley appointed her to serve as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which supervises the National Assessment of Educational Progress; she was a member of NAGB from 1997 to 2004. From 1995 to 2005 she held the Brown Chair in Education Studies at the Brookings Institution

She participated in a "blog debate" called "Bridging Differences" with Steinhardt School colleague Deborah Meier on the website of Education Week from February 26, 2007 until September 2012. She now has her own blog, Diane Ravitch's Blog.

In 2013, she joined forces with a writer and former teacher, Anthony Cody, to set up The Network for Public Education which is a foundation dedicated to fighting against educational corporate reforms. She is currently serves on the board of directors as the President of NPE.

Writings and statements on education

Ravitch renounced her earlier support for testing and choice in 2010, in a best-selling book. She critiqued the punitive uses of accountability to fire teachers and close schools, as well as replacing public schools with charter schools and relying on superstar teachers, in The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Undermine Education (2010). In the book Ravitch sharply broke with policies she had formerly espoused and the book became a surprise best seller a month after its release. One reviewer wrote "Ravitch exhibits an interesting mix of support for public education and the rights of teachers to bargain collectively with a tough-mindedness that some on the pedagogical left lack."

While she originally supported No Child Left Behind and charter schools, Ravitch later became "disillusioned," and wrote, "I no longer believe that either approach will produce the quantum improvement in American education that we all hope for." On her blog, she often cited low-performing charters, frauds, corruption, incompetent charter operators, exclusionary policies practiced by charters, and other poor results that diverted funding from public schools into private hands. High-stakes testing, "utopian" goals, "draconian" penalties, school closings, privatization, and charter schools didn't work, she concluded. "The best predictor of low academic performance is poverty—not bad teachers."

Ravitch said that the charter school and testing reform movement was started by billionaires and "right wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation," for the purpose of destroying public education and teachers' unions. She reviewed the documentary Waiting for Superman, directed by Davis Guggenheim, as "propagandistic" (pro-charter schools and anti-public schools), studded with "myths" and at least one "flatly wrong" claim. Of Education Secretary Arne Duncan's Race to the Top program, Ravitch said in a 2011 interview it "is an extension of No Child Left Behind ...[,] all bad ideas." She concluded "We are destroying our education system, blowing it up by these stupid policies. And handing the schools in low-income neighborhoods over to private entrepreneurs does not, in itself, improve them. There's plenty of evidence by now that the kids in those schools do no better, and it's simply a way of avoiding their - the public responsibility to provide good education."

Her book The Language Police (2003) was a criticism of both left-wing and right-wing attempts to stifle the study and expression of views deemed unworthy by those groups. The Amazon.com review summarizes Ravitch's thesis as "pressure groups from the political right and left have wrested control of the language and content of textbooks and standardized exams, often at the expense of the truth (in the case of history), of literary quality (in the case of literature), and of education in general." Publishers Weekly wrote: "Ravitch contends that these sanitized materials sacrifice literary quality and historical accuracy in order to escape controversy."

Ravitch's writings on racial and cultural diversity were summarized by sociologist Vincent N. Parrillo:

[Ravitch] emphasized a common culture but one that incorporated the contributions of all racial and ethnic groups so that they can believe in their full membership in America’s past, present, and future. She envisioned elimination of allegiance to any specific racial and/or ethnic group, with emphasis instead on our common humanity, our shared national identity, and our individual accomplishments.

Ravitch's first book The Great School Wars (1974) is a history of New York City public schools. It described alternating eras of centralization and decentralization. It also tied periodic controversies over public education to periodic waves of immigration.

Published works

Books

• The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973 (1974, reissued 1988, 2000) ISBN 0-8018-6471-2
• The Revisionists Revised: A Critique of the Radical Attack on the Schools (1978) ISBN 0-465-06943-6
• Schools in Cities: Consensus and Conflict in American Educational History (1983) ISBN 0-8419-0850-8
• Against Mediocrity: The Humanities in America's High Schools (1984) ISBN 0-8419-0944-X
• Challenges to the Humanities (1985) ISBN 0-8419-1017-0
• The Schools We Deserve (1985) ISBN 0-465-07236-4
• The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980 (1985) ISBN 0-465-08757-4
• What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know: A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature (1989) ISBN 0-06-015849-2
• The American Reader : Words That Moved a Nation (1990) ISBN 0-06-016480-8
• National Standards in American Education: A Consumer's Guide (1995) ISBN 0-8157-7352-8
• New Schools for a New Century: The Redesign of Urban Education (1997) ISBN 0-300-07874-9
• City Schools: Lessons from New York (2000) ISBN 0-8018-6341-4
• Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform (2000) ISBN 0-684-84417-6
• Kid Stuff: Marketing Sex and Violence to America's Children (2003) ISBN 0-8018-7327-4
• Making Good Citizens: Education and Civil Society (2003) ISBN 0-300-09917-7
• The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (2003) ISBN 0-375-41482-7
• Forgotten Heroes of American Education: The Great Tradition of Teaching Teachers (2006) ISBN 1-59311-448-6
• The English Reader: What Every Literate Person Needs to Know (2006) ISBN 0-19-507729-6
• EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon (2007) ISBN 978-1-4166-0575-1
• The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (2010) ISBN 978-0-465-01491-0
• Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools (2013) ISBN 978-0385350884

Ravitch has published more than 500 articles in scholarly and popular journals.

Awards

Delta Kappa Gamma Educators' Award

1975, for The Great School Wars, New York City, 1805-1973

1984, for The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945- 1980

2011, Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences

Ambassador of Honor Award, English-Speaking Union,

1984, for The Troubled Crusade

1985, for The Schools We Deserve: Reflections on the Educational Crises of Our Times

Honorary degrees

Amherst College

Middlebury College Language Schools

Ramapo College

Reed College

Saint Joseph's College (New York)

Siena College

State University of New York

Union College

Williams College

Other

• Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar, 1984–85
• Henry Allen Moe Prize, American Philosophical Society, 1986
• designated honorary citizen, State of California Senate Rules Committee, 1988, for work on state curriculum
• Alumnae Achievement Award, Wellesley College, 1989
• Medal of Distinction, Polish National Council of Education, 1991
• Literary Lion, New York Public Library, 1992
• Award for Distinguished Service, New York Academy of Public Education, 1994
• Horace Kidger Award, New England History Teachers Association, 1998
• Award of Excellence, St. John's University School of Education, 1998
• John Dewey Education Award, United Federation of Teachers, 2005
• Guggenheim fellowship, 1977
• Honorary Life Trustee, New York Public Library
• John Dewey Award, United Federation of Teachers, New York City, 2005
• Gaudium Award from the Breukelein Institute, 2005
• Uncommon Book Award, Hoover Institution, 2005
• NEA Friend of Education, 2010
• American Association of School Administrators, American Education Award, 2011
• Outstanding Friend of Education Award, Horace Mann League, 2011
• Distinguished Service Award, National Association of Secondary School Principals, 2011
• The Deborah W. Meier Hero in Education Award from FairTest, 2011
• Politico 50, one of the 50 people whose ideas are shaping our society, 2014

Grawemeyer Award in Education for Death and Life of the Great American School System, 2014

See also

• The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman

External links

• Diane Ravitch official website
• (Review of Language Police)
• Diane Ravitch: No Child Left Behind Has Left US Schools with Legacy of "Institutionalized Fraud" — video by Democracy Now!
• Waiting for Superman: Fact or Fiction? BAM! Radio podcast discussion.
• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • Booknotes interview with Ravitch on Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, October 8, 2000.