Diane Ravitch, the historian and leading education reform critic, can be hard to understand. Not that her writing is difficult. Quite the opposite actually, it’s incredibly lucid and lively, and my favorite thing about her in fact. Rather it’s difficult to understand who exactly the person is that could contain both the Diane Ravitch who once wrote so passionately and doggedly in favor of school choice and accountability from the halls of the Hoover Institute, and the Diane Ravitch who now writes reform criticisms with the hyperbole and one-sidedness of a teacher’s union spokesperson. But in a new City Paper piece, Dana Goldstein tries to reconcile the two and find the intellectual continuities that have stayed with her on such a seemingly bipolar intellectual journey. As much of a Ravitch critic as I may be, like Goldstein, I believe that there are some coherent ties that bind old and young Diane, and perhaps surprisingly, one of them is Friedrich Hayek.
One thought on “Diane Ravitch: Teachers’ Hero or Education Hypocrite?”
Comments are closed.
The only constant in the views of Diane Ravitch is that she is always wrong.
I read several of her earlier works and found them, well, Republican. Diatribes, skewing facts, hyperbole, faith/belief-based with no grounding in reality — wedded to beliefs/theories without any sense of nuance, consideration, or critical thinking.
Now, she has switched 180 degrees, and just as sure of her new position as she was when she held the opposite position. Maybe it is as simple as “Obama has bought into my prior rhetoric therefore it must be wrong”? Or maybe she is, well, Democratic? Just taking on some of the more “liberal” faith/belief-based ideas with no grounding in reality — wedded to beliefs/theories without any sense of nuance, consideration, or critical thinking.
Ravitch is just a political hack.