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Diane Ravitch, "An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else" (Columbia UP, 2025)
01:02:58
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Tom Disena from the Department of Communication, Journalism and Public Relations at Oakland University. My guest today is Diane Ravitch, the author of An How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else. For many years, Diane Ravitch was among the country's leading conservative thinkers on education. The cure for what ailed the school system was clear. She believed high stakes standardized testing, national standards, accountability, competition, charters and vouchers. Then Ravage saw what happened when these ideas were put into practice and recanted her long held views. The problem was not bad teachers or failing schools as conservatives claimed, but poverty. She denounced privatization as a hoax that did not help students and that harmed the public school system. She urged action to address the root causes of inequality. My guest today is an historian of education and a prominent commentator about education and politics. Her many books include Reign of Error, the Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools, the Death and Life of the Great American School System, How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education and the Great School Wars, New York City, 1805-1973. Ravitch was assistant secretary of education under President George H.W. bush and served on the National Testing Board during the Clinton administration. She is co founder and President of the Network for Public Education, Diane Ravitch. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:37]
C
Well, thank you very much for inviting me.
- [02:40]
B
So, as we begin our conversation today, I want to tell you first that I find memoirs to be the most challenging books to present on the New Books Network, and yours is perhaps the most challenging one that I have done to date.
- [02:53]
C
Oh, my.
- [02:54]
B
Well, you discuss in a very matter of fact style personal events in your life that I think by any reasonable measure might be called traumatic.
- [03:06]
C
Yes. I decided in this book, I assume at my age, it's my last book, and I just decided to put everything out there. And I wanted to say these things and I have said in writing what in some cases I've never said to anyone in a face to face conversation.
- [03:26]
B
Is that right? So where I'd like to start today is with your citation of Irving Kristol's adage that a neoconservative is a liberal mugged by reality. It seems to me that this book takes that idea and turns it completely on its head.
- [03:43]
C
Well, I guess that was my purpose. I was very friendly with Irvin Crystal and his wife Bea, and I remember him telling me not to go to graduate school, do not get a doctorate. He said, you'll never be able to write again if you get a doctorate. He assumed that I would become one of those people who can only write in academic jargon. And fortunately I resisted that. But he was very sure of himself. And he was one of those people who had been a liberal who long before I met him, had founded something called neoconservatism. And through him and others, I met Nathan Glaser, Pat Moynihan, James Coleman, lots of people in that circle who had been quite liberal, but began to see that they were too liberal. And of course, things have changed so dramatically today that I believe that a lot of people who were then neoconservatives would say, I don't want to do that anymore. Because the prime example is Irving Kristol's son, Bill Kristol. Bill Kristol was the editor of the conservative journal the Weekly Standard. He's now writes for the Bulwark. The Bulwark consists of mostly Republicans who despise Trump. So he's made his turnaround. And I suspect that were Irving and be here, they would find Trump so coarse, so vulgar, so stupid that they would be leading the anti Trump movement as their son Bill is.
- [05:14]
B
Yeah, it's astonishing the degree to which our ideas of left and right have shifted over the last decade or so.
- [05:21]
C
Well, the. When I was many years ago when I was kind of finding my political footing. Conservatives were conservative. They weren't crazy, they weren't maga. They didn't want to tear everything down. They would not have approved of bulldozing the White House, for example. And they would have been appalled by the kind of things that Trump writes on Truth Social and the kind of videos that he puts out about himself. Very boastful, very insulting. And he's made a kind of a mark for himself amongst his base by being as coarse as possible. And people like the Crystals and the Midge Dector and Irving. Not Irving Howe, but Norman Pothoris, who was Mitch Dector's husband, and he was the editor of Commentary. They would have been repulsed by Trump, by his personal behavior, and also, no, they would have liked the support of Israel. But it would be a high price to pay to have someone who was that revolting and who lied constantly. So I think he's redefined conservatism. And maybe it'll have a rebirth somewhere, I don't know. But I won't be there.
- [06:35]
B
You won't be there for that?
- [06:36]
C
No. One of the ways I described the book, I actually wanted to call the book How I Became Woke. And my editor didn't think that was a good idea. I thought it was a great idea to be totally countercultural. I don't know. I did not like the title. I don't like the title. I think it's not memorable. I like the subtitle. I wrote the subtitle. I changed my mind about almost everything, about schools and almost everything. But to me, there's a lot of controversy in the book. There are a lot of personal anecdotes about people that had never been written anywhere by anybody else. And I would have preferred a more provocative title, particularly the fact that I am proudly woke. And there are things you're not allowed to be these days and like in mainstream society, such as it may be. I support dei. I support Critical Race Theory. I mean, I'm appalled when I hear the propaganda campaigns led by the MAGA types. And I'm on the other side of all of them.
- [07:39]
B
Okay, so I hadn't planned on going here directly then. So your support of Critical Race Theory comes in the wake of a fairly caustic interchange that you had with Professor Jeffries.
- [07:55]
C
Oh, yeah. It's funny because I don't think we would have found common ground. And by the way, Leonard Jeffries is the uncle of Hakeem Jeffries. So all of this is very current and what happened was that in the. I guess it was around 1990, 1991, Leonard Jeffries was at that time the head of the African American Studies department at City College and he was asked to write a treatise about the New York State curriculum. I had written the. Co. Written the California State curriculum. And he wrote a really a great screed. And this curriculum was very multicultural, but he felt that it slighted the experiences of non white children and that it was a completely Eurocentric document. So there was a lot of. Based on. He constantly denounced me as being a sophisticated racist Jew from Texas. I didn't think I was all that sophisticated and nor was I racist, but I definitely was from Texas and I'm definitely Jewish. But we had some exchanges and it wasn't very pleasant. I got to be tarred and almost feathered by his distaste for me.
- [09:14]
B
Yeah, there was a fairly soothing editorial that asked a pointed rhetorical question about you.
- [09:20]
C
Yeah, well, I mentioned in the book that at one point I saw a very fuzzy photograph of myself on the front page of one of the black newspapers in New York City. And it had a heading something like, why is this woman still alive? And I felt kind of scared. I didn't like that one bit.
- [09:39]
B
I felt scared for you reading the story. So again, you take this idea of. Of liberal who's been mugged by reality, and let's go back to some of your early experiences and I want to ask if there was something about them that made you willing to accept what George Lakoff calls that sort of neoconservative narrative.
- [10:07]
C
I think. I'm not sure, but I think that first of all, my social circle and came to be very much in the world of the neoconservatives. And I started writing in Commentary, which was Norman Porter, Horace's magazine, and which became really almost the bible of neoconservatism. And I wrote in other places like the Public Interest, edited by Irving Kristol. So it was actually a very illustrious circle because these were all men and a few women who had been well published, well reviewed, well known in sort of intellectual circles. And I was kind of excited and flattered and pleased to be part of it. My earliest writing was not conservative. I wrote about. My history of the New York City schools is very measured. And you, I wouldn't call it either left or right. And then I, when I published a book criticizing revisionist historians, I was marked as a far right conservative because I took issue with the idea that public schools were somehow designed to suppress people. And I think it's very consistent with my views today. I think that public schools were designed to liberate people from ignorance and give them a step up in life. But the public schools became the punching bag of radical historians in the late 1960s. And I wrote a book called the Revisionist Revised, which is the only book I've ever written that's never gone into paperback. For some reason, I'm not sure why. Maybe it just wasn't that interesting to anyone but this small circle of radical historians and their critics. But having criticized the radical historians, that pushed me even farther into being considered a conservative. And I don't know, it just emerged that way. And I think in terms of my earlier life, that what may have made my views more conservative was that I believed in colorblindness and meritocracy and standardized testing, because that was my experience going to schools in Texas and Houston, the schools were segregated. And I never thought much about it because, you know, when you're going to school, you don't stop and think who's missing. You know, you're just aware of who's there and whether you're going to have a date and whether a boy gives you a pom pom for the football game. But when the Brown decision came down in 1954, I went to see the principal of the high school, and I said, well, I read in the newspaper about the Brown decision. Why are we still segregated? And he said to me, well, if we were to integrate all our schools, all the black teachers and principals would lose their jobs. And I thought, but it's still a court, you know, it's still a court decision. I don't understand how we. So I was sort of aware, you know, I could have gone either way at that point. But I think that as my beliefs in high school were, if we stopped judging people by the color of their skin, we would have a better society. That seemed to me a fair standard, colorblindness. What I now understand, which I did not understand then, is that if you have a totally colorblind standard, then you're endorsing the status quo. Because if Harvard and other elite colleges and state universities didn't reach out to find talented young people of color, there would be very few black kids who went to college. And I was opposed to affirmative action because of my belief in colorblindness. And I now believe I was wrong, because I think that affirmative action, when you. I'm trying to judge what has happened over the past, say, 40 or 50 years by the results, the results of affirmative Action have been spectacular. We have very prominent black intellectuals in universities. We have black lawyers, black doctors, black people on television. There has been a conscious effort to reflect who we are as a society and also to make sure that the professions become racially integrated. That's the result of affirmative action. So I think that has been a very positive output outcome, as opposed to the things I criticize in education, which are standardized testing, which I used to believe in, and also charter schools and vouchers, which I think is privatization and steals from all of us. We are the public, and the public schools belong to all of us.
- [14:50]
B
So in a lot of ways, your story, though, almost demonstrates, is almost an exemplar of some of these ideas of merit and meritocracy. You were a student in a public high school in Houston and you found your way to Wellesley.
- [15:07]
C
Yeah, that's one of the reasons why I believed in meritocracy, because I benefited by it. But at that time, it didn't occur to me the downside, for instance, I think that one of the reasons I was recognized was because I was coming from Houston and I had high SAT scores. So the test definitely benefited me. And unlike most people who get high scores, I did not come from a wealthy family, but we had medical care, we had food, we went to the dentist. We were, I guess, middle class. And I was not suffering from privation in any sense, but I think that I was a beneficiary of all the things I'm now criticizing. No doubt about it. I say that in the book, that I didn't realize it, but I was enjoying what I used to not believe in, which is white privilege.
- [16:01]
B
So you want to tell us a little bit about your experience, though, at Wellesley, because you write in a very touching way about that time in your life.
- [16:08]
C
Well, I love Wellesley for many reasons. I went to coed public schools From K through 12, and it was fun. I enjoyed it. But I always felt that I suffered under some sort of a burden because I was smart and I liked books and I liked to read. And so sometimes people, friends, would refer to me as a brainiac, which was not a compliment. Or there were other ways of saying, well, you're not really one of us because you like to read books. And I don't know, I forget if I wrote about this. I probably did, but on several occasions, some of my classmates copied my answers off test, and I went along with it because everybody was cheating. So, okay, you want to cheat off my test, I don't care. But I never cheated off anyone else's test. I got to Wellesley and I discovered, you know, this is a place. It's all female. It's great because nobody's sitting in the back adjusting their makeup. Nobody cares if they even put lipstick on you Dress the way you want to dress. You're not dressing to impress the boys. And I'm no longer a brainiac. I'm kind of in the middle somewhere. And that was nice. There were so many women there, or girls, as we still call ourselves, who were way smarter than me. And that was a different experience. I had never experienced that. I was one of the four valedictorians of a class of 400 people at San Jacinto High School. And as I said, the school was segregated. And I liked it well enough. It was fun. I look back on it fondly. But I loved Wellesley because Wellesley gave me an incredible sense of freedom. And I also love the fact that it was kind of a stuffy New England school where with my kind of Texas sensibility, I could act in silly ways and everyone would understand. Oh, that's just Diane being Diane.
- [18:04]
B
Okay, so I'm thinking about this. My son attends a private school that operates on a co divisional model. So the girls and boys are separated during class time, but otherwise go to school together.
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C
Oh, that's interesting. I never heard of that.
- [18:23]
B
Well, and I've got another question that I want to ask at the end of the interview. So I'm wondering if you've ever heard of, and I like your description of Wellesley, think that it's really been beneficial for him.
- [18:35]
C
Well, a lot of the same old sex colleges have become co ed and they're fairly small number that have held out. And Wellesley is one of them. And I'm glad of that. You know, I had male teachers, but all of those there were, were female. And I think they have a certain problem there about the whole issue of trans. Because they have, I think, girls who became boys. And the college seems okay with that. And the students are certainly okay with that. I don't think they accept boys who became girls, but I'm not sure.
- [19:10]
B
Well, my son's at a Catholic school, so I'm sure this is very much. I will be honest to say that I found the chapters on your marriage to be particularly heartbreaking. It's clear from your final words at the end of the book that you've made a kind of peace with that time in your life. You describe here a great deal of interpersonal turmoil while at the same time you're embarking on your professional career. As a writer and a scholar, I was moved by that because it seems to me that you're in a home situation that almost seems to be working against having the kind of esteem that you need to embark on, the kind of accomplishments that you manage to achieve.
- [19:56]
C
Well, my marriage was, I guess from the outside it looked ideal. I married a guy who came from a very prominent family in New York City. And I wrote a lot about my mother in law because she was remarkable and her friends were. There was no Google at the time, so I didn't realize that her friends were like the creme de la creme of not just New York society, but on the COVID of Vogue magazine and photographed by Cecil Beaton and all kinds of remarkable people that she associated with. And so I moved into this very socially prominent family. My husband was very successful, big bis. And yet although he was successful, he would turn to me at night, maybe once a week and say, if I lost everything, could you support us? And that was like a dagger in my heart because I had never worked in my life. I had been a mother raising children, writing an occasional article where in some small magazine that didn't pay. And I thought, how am I going to be able to support us? I can't even pay our monthly maintenance on our apartment. But he was, I think of him as a one ring circus. And I was a bystander in that one ring circus. And if there were three rings, the other two were had no one in them performing. And he was actually a very incredibly dedicated, honest guy who is a model of integrity. And I was watching a show the other night on the History Channel about how the mob had. The mafia had infiltrated almost every industry. And he used to tell me stories about guys coming up and saying, we want to put no show workers on your payroll. And he said absolutely not. He was fearless and he would not allow them to shake him down. And I had tremendous admiration for him. But the problem was he was a sexist pig. And I say that now he's dead. So I can say things like that. He was a sexist pig and he was always berating me because I wasn't taking care of his clothing appropriately or I wasn't doing something that all women know how to do and I didn't. And I'm not the world's greatest housekeeper. So he had plenty to complain about. And I was trying to be an intellectual and he demanded something quite different, which was a woman who could be the mistress of grand dinner parties. And that just wasn't me. And I Think what ultimately ended our marriage was the fact that we lost a child to leukemia and I wanted more children. So I had two children and I wanted more children. And he wouldn't tolerate it. And I got pregnant against his wishes and he insisted that I get an abortion. And this was before abortion was legal. And he went three weeks without speaking to me. And we eventually went to family counseling where there were three counselors. They all agreed that I should have an abortion. And I was ganged up on and it was something I didn't want to do and it broke my heart, frankly. So that was. He didn't think of it as a big deal. I thought of it as a very big deal. And to this day I regret it again. But I have to say one other thing about my ex husband who died a couple of years ago. He's the only person I've ever known who said f you to Donald Trump. Yeah, he was in a government position. He usually worked for a dollar a year when he was on a government job. And he was in charge of giving out tax credits to builders who built low income housing. And Donald Trump came to see him and said he wanted a tax credit for renovating a major hotel that was above Grand Central Station. And Dick's. Dick, my husband Dick said to him, is this going to be for low income families? He said, no, it's going to be a luxury hotel. And he said, well, we don't give. I'm not going to give you tax credits. This is not the purpose of the program. It's. That would be breaking the law. And Trump said, I am going to go to Governor Hugh Carey and tell him about you and you're going to get fired. And Dick told him off and said, well, f you. And I don't know that anyone ever has said that to Donald Trump, although I hope that many people have said it.
- [24:14]
B
I would think so at some point. Although that's not the story that you tell in the book.
- [24:21]
C
That is the story in the book.
- [24:23]
B
Oh, I don't. Okay. I don't remember the one about Trump.
- [24:25]
C
Okay. I don't have an index. I insisted on no index, no footnotes because I wanted this to be not a scholarly book. But this is my memoir.
- [24:34]
B
Very dialogical. You can just sort of hear the voice. So it was around this time that you started your relationship with the magazine the New Leader, which is sort of what led you to your career writing about education. Do you want to tell us a little bit about this part of your journey?
- [24:51]
C
Yeah, that was kind of interesting. To me at least, because I had had my first child and was looking about for a way to start my career. And I had interviewed for jobs and they all turned out to be very menial typing jobs. And I looked in the New York Times every day and there used to be classified advertising, which doesn't exist anymore, and there was advertising of jobs for women and jobs for men. That's the way it was. And so I'd list do the jobs for women. And they were all looking for a gal Friday. And I didn't want to be a gal Friday, you know, I wanted to have a job where I could actually use my brain. And one day when I was about to start looking through the classified ads, I read the editorial and there was a small editorial at the bottom of the page acknowledging the death of Sol Levitas, who was the editor of New Leader. And they said it was a democratic socialist magazine and that it, that Saul Levitas was a Menshevik. And they went on to describe it as being a non ideological, but most definitely a democratic leaning magazine. And I thought, oh, that sounds perfect, I want to work there. And I called to the New Leader and they said, well, you know, Mr. Levitas just died. This is not a good time to be calling. I said, oh, I'm sorry about that. I'm looking for a job, I'll do anything. So she said, well, come on down, you know, somebody will see you. And I got to their offices and basically offered to work for next to nothing. I think I was paid $10 a week. I just needed, I needed a job. And I needed that job, which was to be everything, to learn how to edit, to occasionally write an article. And I did write a few articles there. And I had a wonderful experience meeting people who were Mensheviks and ex Bolsheviks and Trotskyites and Canaanites and Shackmanites. And so it was a real education for me. And I actually, in the closing issue of the New Leader some years back, I wrote an article called How I Got my master's Degree at the New Leader. And that was a lot of fun. It was a real education for me.
- [27:03]
B
Yeah, it's an exciting time that you write about. And again, we could probably spend this entire time talking about some of the people. And you've already kind of discuss some of them today, but some of the names that you've encountered along your path, Al Shanker and Ed Hirsch, Daniel Bell, Bayard Rustin. That's a great FU story that you tell that he related to you, if you Want to share that one? It's kind of terrific.
- [27:32]
C
Well, Bayard Rustin became a very good friend of ours because my ex husband was very active in the connection between the labor movement and the civil rights movement. And Bayard Rustin and his. And A. Philip Randolph were at the apex of the meeting of those two. So Dick befriended Bayard Rusted, and he often came to dinner or we went out with him. And he was a very, very interesting and charming man. He spoke with a clip British accent, although he was born in Chester or Westchester, Pennsylvania. Uh, and the story. I think the story you're referring to is he went to an AFL CIU CIO meeting in Miami. And while he was there, he went to see Marlena Dietrich Singh. And he described. He described the incident. And he said, there she was in her shimmering silver gown. She was an angel. And I threw her. I was sitting first row right at a table next to the stage, and I threw her a bouquet of flowers. And I said, and why did you love her so much? And she. He said, because she told Hitler to go f himself. And that remained with me forever. So I have two f you stories in the book. I don't think there are any more.
- [28:52]
B
So I think the simplest way to start, maybe the next part of this is just simply to say, and then you met Mary.
- [29:01]
C
Well, I was, interestingly, at a conference that. I was one of the sponsors of the conference. It was funded by the National Endowment for Humanities, and the chair of the National Endowment for Humanities at that time was the notorious right winger Bill Bennett. And my then conservative partner, Checker. Finn and I were sponsors of the conference, and we invited teachers from around the country to come with someone else from their school, an administrator and a teacher, to talk about the importance of the humanities in schools. So we were promoting the humanities, and we had all people from across the country listen to people like Edie Hirsch and other scholars talk about why it was important to learn history, literature, the arts, so forth. And while at one of the conferences in Minneapolis, um, I. I'm. I was walking from one end of the auditorium to the other, and at one point I was. I won't say accosted, but met this young teacher who. Well, I won't go into the whole story of how I met her, because that's a little longer, but she brought me wine at a. At a cocktail party that we were holding that evening, and she more or less took care of me. And I thought she was very funny. She made me laugh. She told funny stories. And I thought, you know, I don't know. I'm so miserable at home. And Dick is constantly complaining about his. The collar on his jackets are not rolled correctly. And I've taken them to the best cleaners in New York, and they're still not rolled correctly. And this woman makes me laugh. And we began having phone conversations that last forever. And at some point, I decided, I think, that I'm going to leave my husband. I really like her a lot. And six months after I met her or eight months after I met her, I decided to leave. But I didn't leave for a year. I met her in the spring of 84, and I left in 85. And in 86, I was divorced, and I embarked on a whole new life. And we've been together since 85, so that's 40 years. And we got married in 2012 when it became legal in New York State. And we have some concerns about what the future holds, given the nature of the Supreme Court, about whether they're going to roll back the cases that made our marriage legal. But, you know, despite the fact that I'm woke, I'm still pretty conservative in my life. I mean, I don't go around waving banners and I'm. I don't throw my clothes off and get naked in front of audiences. There are all kinds of things I don't do because I'm a rather proper person. But it just seems so crazy that the Supreme Court would say, you can't be with a person you love. You can't share your life with the person you love. And that's what happened there. We've been together, as I said, since 1985. We're pretty stable.
- [32:04]
B
It's also during this time, and I think a lot of people listening today will recognize your name from your work as the Assistant Secretary of education under George H.W. bush. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your time in that administration?
- [32:18]
C
Well, I was invited in 1991 by Lamore Alexander to come to have lunch in Washington. And I thought, oh, that's amazing. You know, he's going to be the. I knew he was going to be the Secretary of Education. He said, why don't you come and have lunch with me? And the new deputy secretary, David Kearns, who was the CEO of Xerox, and I said, oh, that would be fun. Yeah, I'd like to do that. And I had not spent much time in D.C. i'd never worked in government. And I had lunch with them, and I talked about standards and curriculum and all the things that I care a lot about. I want to see kids with more, I guess, classical curriculum. I want all kids to have a great education. And they said at the end of the lunch, they said, well, would you come down and join us and be Assistant Secretary of Education for Research? And I said, well, let me think about it. I have to get home. And I know I had to talk to Mary about it. And it turned out that simultaneously, she had been invited by the AFT to come to Washington and work in a job there in their educational issues department. So we thought, well, we can both go to Washington. We'll buy a house. Which we did. And I told them yes. And then I had to go through a grueling few months of not knowing whether I would be approved, because at that time, the government did not knowingly hire people who are gay. And so I knew that the FBI was looking at everything they could. They interviewed all of my neighbors in Brooklyn, and I actually turned to a man named Leonard Garman, who had worked for Richard Nixon, believe it or not, and said, I have this problem. And I explained my problem. I said, I'm a loyal American citizen. I'm not going to be compromised. I'm sure I won't have any top secrets anyway about education that the Russians might want, and I need help to get through the process. So he wrote a very carefully worded letter and said, don't believe all the rumors you hear. I'm well qualified and I'll be a good assistant secretary. And then I was approved. But it was. That's kind of a hard go. For a while, I didn't know if they would let it go. But after I left office and I had a very interesting time, I really loved being in the job because I traveled a lot. I met a lot of incredibly interesting people, like having lunch with George Lucas at Skywalker Ranch, which has nothing to do with my job, but if I hadn't had that job, I'd have never been invited. And, you know, there are a lot of fun things, like flying in Mrs. Bush's air force, too, and grilling her all the way from D.C. to Houston, where she was speaking. And she asked me to take her apart so that she could go meet her husband, George, the President, at the Grand Ole Opry that night. Fun things. And it was interesting. I learned a lot about the government. I learned how it worked. I learned things that didn't work. I didn't spend my intellectual capital. I gained a lot of intellectual capital by having these experiences. So it was a great period of time. And when it was all over, I guess I was more conservative because I'd been working with people who considered this who were conservatives. And I wrote a couple of articles supporting vouchers. My idea was vouchers only for Catholic schools. But that turns out to be not a good idea because when you pass vouchers, they're for every school, every religious school, even devil worshipping schools, whatever you want to call it. In any event, I ended up being a supporter of charters. And when the administration wound down, I came back to New York and got involved in a number of conservative think tanks.
- [36:05]
B
Although it's also fair to say that charters were not at that time what they have since become.
- [36:11]
C
No charters. At the time I began advocating it was at the very beginning. And my idea was very much like Albert Shanker's. Now, Shanker has been a friend of mine for many years, long before I went to D.C. and his idea was that charter schools would be unionized, that they would be approved by the district and that they would have a five year term to show what they could do. And most importantly, they would be designed to take the kids who were failing in public school to prove that there were better ways to teach them. And I remember him saying they would take the kids who were sitting in the back of the class with their head on the desk because they were bored out of their mind. And he said, now if we had schools created to develop new ways of reaching these kids, that would be terrific. So he introduced the idea in 1988. He went around the country selling it. And then the first charter school that opened and the first charter law that passed in Minnesota completely eviscerated everything he believed in. They didn't say anything about the charters should be unionized. They didn't say anything about they would be teacher led and they didn't say anything banning for profit charters. And so when the charters got underway by 1993, when there were quite a number of them, not a large number, but a few that were open, he turned against them. I think it was because of the Noah Webster Classical Academy, which was a very conservative kind of right wing school. And that was not what he wanted. And he saw that the for profits were going into the charter business and that was not what he wanted. And he saw, he came to believe that charters would be no different from vouchers. And it took a long time for others to catch up. But he was right.
- [37:55]
B
And to a large degree, they were also skimming the very best students out of the public school.
- [37:59]
C
Right? They were not taking the kids who were sitting in the back of the classroom, they were. Many of them were not taking the kids with special needs. Many of them were not taking the kids who couldn't speak English. So the public schools in some cities became the dumping ground because the charter schools were skimming off the ones likeliest to get high scores.
- [38:19]
B
So your change of heart about education seems to have occurred during Michael Bloomberg's tenure as mayor of New York and the changes that he initiated to the public school system there. You say you started that period with great hopes for some of the things that he was trying to accomplish, but you came to see them very differently. This is the point, I think, where you become mugged by reality.
- [38:42]
C
Yes, I was a neoconservative who got mugged by reality.
- [38:47]
B
So here I'd like to ask you to read from page 174 of your book, if you would.
- [38:52]
C
Okay. In 2009, before leaving the board of the Thomas Fordham Foundation, I oppose the motion to accept funding. Oh, I'm reading the wrong page. I hope you can clip this up. I began to see education reform in a different light. In its current state, it did not mean funding schools with ample resources, strengthening the entry requirements for new teachers, helping new teachers get better at their work, improving instructional materials in the curriculum, providing the arts and music in every school, or raising teacher salaries. Reform and its present guides meant strategies of tests and punishment. It meant high stakes testing, punishment of teachers, principals, and schools if scores did not improve, rewards if they did, and choice for students to move to a different school. Reformers assumed that students earned low scores because their teachers and principals were not trying hard enough and needed threats and incentives to motivate them. They believed that failing schools, so called failing schools, needed to be closed and their staff fired en masse. This was the version of reform that was riding high. The Gates foundation continued to pour millions of dollars into New York City to open new small high Schools, although in 2008, the foundation abandoned its own small schools initiative and declared that it was ineffectual. The Broad foundation awarded New York City its $1 million prize for the most improved urban district in 2007, although the city scores on the federal NAEP test for that year showed no improvement at all. So that was an eye opener for me. I met Michael Bloomberg when he first became mayor. He called me at my home. He knew that I was very active on local television and wrote articles in the local newspapers. And he invited me to meet with him, and I did. And I tell a story about how he actually Offered to put me on his private payroll. And I quickly did a brain check and said, private payroll, that means not a job, but rather pay me to privately work for him. Which meant when I went on television, I would always say nice things. And I thought, he's asking me to sell my independence, and I can't do that. So what I did instead was, I'll be glad to advise you, but here's what you can do for me. Send a $25,000 contribution to the Mary Beth Scholarship Fund at St. Joseph's College in Brooklyn. And you can call me anytime you want and I'll give you my reaction. So that worked for both of us. The next day, St. Joseph's College had a $25,000 check, which started a new scholarship fund. Which we have contributed to every year since then. Exactly.
- [41:41]
B
So a lot of what changed your mind has to do with the relationship between merit and test scores. Tell us a little bit about how you see this relationship and perhaps explain to our listeners Campbell's Law.
- [41:54]
C
I'm sure explain as well.
- [41:58]
B
You write about this later on in the chapter, the idea that you sort of measure what the. Whenever you do social scientific research, you basically find what you see go out to measure and thereby alter it a little bit.
- [42:12]
C
Yeah. Well, what I learned about testing, a lot of what I learned about testing, I learned by being on the National Assessment Governing Board. And that was the board that Clinton appointed me to. And what I discovered there was that very often a question had no right answer. Not very often. Occasionally. And occasionally a question had two right answers. And I would struggle to see. I was reading questions that were on the history test, the civics test, and the reading test. I could not read the math questions because I couldn't answer the 8th grade questions. They were too hard. I mean, when people complain about how American kids are so far behind and our country's going to fall apart, which they've been saying now for 50 years, and we have probably the best economy and the most vibrant culture in the world. And yet for 50 years they've been saying our schools are destroying our society. I realized that the tests have become harder and they're so difficult that even I couldn't pass the eighth grade test. So I would love all the legislators who crack down schools to take the eighth grade test in mathematics specifically and publish their results. And I think it would be enlightening to them. They would have more respect for the kids. But what I discovered about testing is I should have known this long before, but I didn't. The Standardized test is normed on a bell curve. The bell curve never closes. So when we have people ranting about the schools are failing because half the kids are below the median, half the kids are always below the median, half the kids are always above the median. But more importantly, I discovered that the kids who are above the median, and particularly those at the top, come from well to do families. And the greater family wealth there is, the higher the test scores. And as you go down the scale and the scores drop, the family income is also lower. At the bottom of the scale are the poorest kids. At the top of the scale are the richest kids. And there will be people who will point to exceptions. I may be an exception and say, oh, look, there's a rich kid who's not too bright and he didn't benefit by his affluence, and they'll find a poor kid who made perfect scores on the sat. Those are the anomalies, Those are the exceptions. The reality is, and I discovered this when I started looking for it, every test, every standardized test, whether it's international, national, state, act, sat, they all have the same disparity, that the test scores reflect family income. They also reflect family education, but mostly they reflect family income. The kid who's in a well to do family will have medical care, dental checkups, vision screening, all of that, and know that there will be a meal on the table at mealtime, breakfast, dinner, school, lunch, whatever. But the kid who lives in poverty may have roaches and vermin running around the apartment. It makes it hard to sleep, misses school because has to stay home and take care of his little brother or sister while his mother's off to work. There are just a million reasons why it's really hard for poor kids to be on an even keel. They're not on an even keel. So that's why it was a revelation to me. And I feel particularly stupid coming to it so late. That poverty is far more important than test scores, that if we decreased poverty, we would increase test scores. But the test scores are not the most important measures. And I would say that what kids actually do should be judged by their teachers. And we should trust teachers. We don't trust teachers. To me, what the standardized test is is a statement of disrespect for teaching and saying, we don't trust you to honestly grade your kids. Well, when I went to school, which was a very long time ago, we didn't have standardized testing and our teachers were fair graders. I'm sure they would be fair graders today. Not everyone would get an A. It might be a little harder for colleges to make choices about who they're going to admit. But I think that what we should have learned and what I've learned is that young people have so many different kinds of skills and talents, and the ability to exceed on a standardized test is not the most important skill in.
- [46:44]
B
The world, but it's one of the ones that we teach the most.
- [46:47]
C
Yes. And then the other thing that turned me around in testing was to see, having advocated for standardized testing for so many years, to see how once it was put in place as the be all and end all, it began to destroy education. Because there were schools that dropped the arts. There were schools that were teaching snippets of literature rather than whole books. Because on a test, they never ask you about a whole book. They give you a snippet, and then you read that snippet out of a context. And so the schools began adopting that method of teaching snippets. And they were many states and many cities eliminated recess, cut back on the time for science, civics and history, foreign languages, those were not important. The only thing that was important was, was reading and math. And that's not a good education. That's why when I did my big turnaround, my book was called the Death and Life of the Great American School System. How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. And that's something that has been very hard to get across over the years because people think, well, how are you going to measure education if you don't have testing? Well, how do we measure it? 50 years ago, before everyone was taking the NCL v. Stall test, we found ways to measure student performance. I think our schools actually are far better than they were when I was a student. And it would be shocking to many of the pundits to hear that, but I believe it's true.
- [48:12]
B
I don't think there's any question about it. When I look at what my son is a junior in high school, and when I look at the things that he's doing, even when he was, as you said, in the eighth grade, it's just light years above where I was.
- [48:25]
C
In high school, well, it's a different world. And I think that to force everyone into this one constrained box and is wrong. And the more I learned about standardized testing, the less I believed that it was of any value, because there are questions that are bad questions and there are answers that are wrong. And one of the incidents that I mentioned in the book is that a poet learned that two of her Poems were being used on the Texas state test. And when she saw the questions and the answers, she said, well, they're wrong. The answers are wrong. They ask you, what's the purpose of the author? That was not my purpose. Why are they giving that as the answer? It's wrong. And everything that was based on her poetry, she just said, I wish they'd not include me on their standard assessing. It's all wrong.
- [49:14]
B
So, again, this experience is sort of the linchpin that took you from a conservative reformer to woke activist. So where are we standing today?
- [49:26]
C
Well, I am passionately opposed to the Trump administration. I think that the destruction that's going on in Washington is terrifying, that tearing down the White House is bad enough, tearing apart oversight for federal funds is an outrage. The money that's currently the billions of dollars that's currently allocated for kids with special needs will be turned over to the states as a block grant. And what that means is they can take that money instead of spending it on kids who need it. It can be used for vouchers and charters. And they are intending to eliminate the Department of Education. And before the election, I said, and even after the election, before the inauguration, I wrote in various places, they'll never eliminate the Department of Education because the Republicans are not going to vote for that. They can't do it without a vote in Congress. It turns out they didn't need a vote in Congress. They're just firing. First, they started by firing half the people who work in the department, and since then, they've laid off even more. And the people who worked in special education are all gone. And what little is left of it will be transferred to Health and Human Services, where I guess Robert Kennedy will have something to say about it. And to me, he is the leading crackpot in the United States. So the other thing that's horrendous is what they're doing to civil rights enforcement. They have redefined civil rights enforcement not to protect minorities who were historically discriminated against, but to say that any acknowledgement of race or gender or any of the other categories that were previously protected, ethnicity, religion, et cetera, these are not the protected categories. They consider that any recognition of these categories is itself a form of discrimination. So the only people they worry about protecting are white males, especially if they're Christian. Christian white males are protected, so you're a protected class. But people who are black, who come from a long legacy of mismaltreatment and who need a break, will not get a break. And if they do get A break. The Trump administration will withhold their funding. What they're doing to higher education is an outrage. I mean, it used to be that when we thought of Republicans, we thought of local control and government should keep its hands off of education. And the law actually is very explicit in saying that officials in the federal Department of Education cannot affect the curriculum in any way or the choice of textbooks. And now they're advocating for patriotic education. They're not allowed to do that. That's illegal. But these days, try finding a court that will tell them it's illegal. It just happens to be in federal law. So I think they're running roughshod over institutions. I'm sick about the cutting of federal aid. I think about the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, children, women, men, who will die because they'll not have proper medical care, relying on American medicines, and it's been cut off and will not have food and will starve to death because of the decisions of this administration. And they move so quickly to eliminate federal aid that I don't even think even Republicans were prepared for that. But I'm furious that there are Republicans in Congress because they could stop it and they won't.
- [52:57]
B
Afterward. Your final thoughts in this book, you talk about the decision in Maine that the Supreme Court decision having to do with schools in Maine that will allow public funding for religious schools. This is something I wanted to ask you about. So I attended a school that was called a shared time program. I attended a public high school in the morning for three classes and then finished my day at a Catholic school down the street.
- [53:34]
C
And was the Catholic school funded by the government?
- [53:37]
B
The Catholic school was not. As a matter of fact, in one part of it, the public school and the Catholic school both occupied the same building with two separate wings, each with its own principal.
- [53:50]
C
Well, that is certainly an unusual arrangement. And I said, you know, I'm very pro Catholic school. I have sponsored children and paid the tuition for kids going to Catholic school. My wife is a very devoted Roman Catholic. She goes to Mass every Sunday. She loves the nuns. She is a trustee of the college where she graduated, and she spent 16 years in Catholic education. And so she probably doesn't agree with me about doctors, but we agree to disagree. I just think that what's really the real beneficiaries of voucher, the voucher movement are first of all, wealthy families, because they're the ones getting the vouchers and evangelical schools where they teach kids, you know, the dinosaurs and people were at the same time. And they also Teach racism, and they also exclude children who are not of their religion. I think that the voucher movement is accomplishing multiple goals for the far right wing. And as somebody who has. I remember the mccarthy era. I remember debates about, you know, the far right taking over, as they did for a period of time in Houston. And I remember the days of segregation and the effort to fight back against it. School choice was very popular in the south after 1954, and there were several states that passed voucher legislation with the intent of protecting white schools and keeping black kids out because they assumed that black kids would choose to stay in black schools, and the white kids would choose to stay in white schools because there would be violence if they. If anybody crossed over and no one would. The courts knocked those voucher plans out, and now the courts are step by step moving further in that direction. But while I'm a great fan of catholic schools, I'm not a great fan of funding a lot of other religious schools. I'm Jewish, and I'm opposed to funding Jewish schools. The yeshivas in New York state get tons of public money. I don't think they should. I think they should pay for their own schooling, just as other people in private schools do. My fundamental view these days, and it wasn't all my life, but it certainly is now, is the public money should go for public schools, and that public schools should continue to have doors open to everyone, to educate children with disabilities, to educate children who have low test scores, and to provide a place where American children can come together and learn together, knowing that we're going to live in a world in this century where people of different backgrounds work together. But we're moving towards a very segregated school system, more so than maybe ever before. And I think that this begins in the schools. So I think the mingling and intermingling of Americans in school is very important, but mostly important for teaching democracy and teaching that we have an obligation to one another and teaching about, if you're a citizen, you should support schools, public schools, the way you support a fire department. You may never use the public schools. You know, there are people who have their kids in private school. They should pay their taxes for public schools. There are people who will never have a fire in their house. They should pay for the fire department. There are people who will never need the police. They should pay for the police department. I mean, it's a matter of what's the common good and what's private. And the republicans had been pushing since the beginning of the century for consumerism in schooling. And I remember Jeb Bush in 2012 spoke to the Republican convention and he said choosing a school should be like choosing the kind of milk you want to drink. Do you want chocolate milk? Do you want 1%, 2%, 4%, almond milk, goat milk, oat milk? On and on. And it's just a choice. And I don't think it's that kind of a choice. I think that schools can build communities, should build communities, and should teach people to live together.
- [58:08]
B
So as we wrap up today, I'm going to ask if you would read that passage we talked about before, the week before you started talking on air.
- [58:18]
C
Yes, I was in the introduction to the book. I gave a summary of what was, what was to come. And I said, I still believe in standards, but not so much in standardized testing, which has built in biases and is best at measuring family income, family education and the ability to answer questions on standardized tests. I believe in judging people by their experience, their integrity, their capability and their character. What would it mean to be not woke, uncaring, heartless, indifferent to the suffering and needs of others? That's not not me, and that's not who I want to be. I believe in telling the truth to the best of one's ability and pursuing justice. I wish to see our society eliminate poverty, ensure that everyone has a decent life. A good nation would not permit people to die on the street because they can't afford food or housing or medical care. I am puzzled by people who say they are Christians, yet rail against those who are woke. I believe that the Jesus of the New Testament was woke. Although I am a Jew, my views are aligned with his. Feed the hungry, tend to the sick, comfort the afflicted, clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, help the most vulnerable among us. That is my definition of woke. And so today I am proudly woke, and I'm aligned with Jesus.
- [59:41]
B
You could have used that as the title to your book. Diane Ravitch, thank you so much for taking the time to talk today.
- [59:47]
C
Thank you, Tom. It's been a pleasure to talk to you once again.
- [59:51]
B
My guest today has been Diane Ravitch, the author of An How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else from Columbia University Press. My name is Tom decenna, and you are listening to the New Books Network.
- [60:03]
C
Thank you.