The Mystery of Diane Ravitch

For years, some education reformers have wondered “what happened” to Diane Ravitch. Her new memoir offers up intriguing tidbits but doesn’t provide a definitive answer.

For those who aren’t familiar with Ravitch, she came to prominence beginning in the 1980s as an advocate of charter schools, rigorous academic standards, and high-stakes tests tied to those standards—the keystones of the education reform movement of the late 20^th and early 21^st century. But in her late sixties, she had a radical change of heart, fiercely denouncing those very policies.

At the age of 87, she is now a revered figure among those on the left who share her current views—not only forgiven for her previous transgressions but celebrated for having the courage to admit the error of her ways. Meanwhile, her former comrades-in-arms in the conservative wing of the education reform movement are still scratching their heads about her transformation.1

I’ve been curious about it too, but for somewhat different reasons. Before she became an education activist, Ravitch was an education historian—and a critic of the “progressive” education philosophy that has dominated schools of education for the past century, albeit under different names.2

Generally speaking, that philosophy has frowned on the idea that a teacher should stand in front of a class and impart information. Rather than being the “sage on the stage,” the saying goes, a teacher should be a “guide on the side,” facilitating students’ ideally self-directed journeys of inquiry and discovery. When researching my book The Knowledge Gap, I drew heavily on Ravitch’s accounts of the history of this approach both for an overall understanding of education orthodoxy and for anecdotes illustrating its foibles.3

Content-Rich Curriculum

In her earlier incarnation, Ravitch was also a strong advocate for content-rich, knowledge-building curriculum. She played a key role in encouraging E.D. Hirsch, Jr., to write Cultural Literacy, the 1987 best-seller that identified schools’ failure to build students’ knowledge as a fundamental cause of education inequity.

Hirsch’s insight was that students from more highly educated families were better able to acquire the academic knowledge and vocabulary that enabled reading comprehension. By imparting that kind of knowledge to all students, Hirsch argued, schools could significantly level the playing field. But largely as a result of progressive education orthodoxy, they focus instead on trying to teach “thinking skills” that can’t actually be taught in the abstract. That approach