I am a historian of education. I started the blog in 2012 to draw attention to the nefarious push for privatization. The privatization movement was and is well-funded by billionaires and highly coordinated. Its leaders attacked public schools as “failing,” they railed against teachers, and they advocated for charter schools. And of course, they hate unions. They pushed the idea that “school choice” would inevitably lead to better education, as parents would of course choose the best schools. Competition would produce better schools.
But the idea they really pushed was that schools are a consumer choice, not a public good. Charter schools were a step on the road to vouchers. Vouchers completely destroy the fundamental idea that public schools are a civic responsibility that all of us pay for because all of us benefit, whether or not we have children in public schools.
I wrote three books to spread the word about the hoax of the privatization movement. It directed public money to Walmart-style chains, grifters and entrepreneurs.
But since the re-election of grifter Trump, I have written far more about Trump than about education.
You deserve an explanation.
Trump is a threat to our democracy.
He has turned control of the government over to Elon Musk, a man lacking in understanding of government and lacking in empathy. Musk is ransacking every part of the federal government, ruthlessly firing civil servants and cutting contracts but leaving untouched the billions he receives every year.
Trump has upended the world by insulting our allies and praising authoritarians.
He attacks NATO and the EU. He scorns Ukraine, which was ruthlessly invaded by Russia. He sides with Putin. He opens a tariff war with our neighbors.
I have lived a long life and I have never been more afraid for the survival of the country I love than I am now. We are led by fools and scoundrels.
Trump and Musk are trying to dismantle the federal government. The damage they are inflicting will take years to repair. Valuable agencies like USAID and the Department of Education have been closed without bothering to get approval from Congress. Thousands of civil servants have been fired with no due process or evaluation of their significance.
And we are only two months into his term.
The survival of our public schools depends on the survival of our society.
Trump hates public schools. He wants to fund vouchers everywhere so that children may be indoctrinated in religious schools, so that parents can be paid for home schooling, so that rich parents can be subsidized.
We are in a terrible place.
Trump is a puppet of Putin. He has never said anything critical of Putin, although he is fast to insult everyone else. Why? What does Putin have over Trump?
He has appointed the least qualified people to head every department, with the possible exception of Marco Rubio, who has abandoned his core beliefs to serve Trump.
Of course, I am worried about the survival of public schools.
I’m even more concerned about the survival of our democracy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
DJT is simply the Front Man for a very old battle to reclaim The Light. It is that well-lit path that we try to follow here.
On FDR’s Re-Election In 1936. “We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
Those Old Enemies Of Peace had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today.
They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
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Hello Diane: What you write here about your intentions I have never doubted, nor stopped appreciating. But it’s always good to stop a minute to clarify one’s bearings.
I think there are some hopeful signs going on right now, and your consistent work here and elsewhere are surely a large part of that flow. CBK
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Thank God people like you are speaking out and keeping us informed of the horrors Dump is inflicting on our country on a daily basis. Please continue to do so!
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We are in the middle of what can only be described as a constitutional crisis. Without a democracy there will be little, if anything, left of free, secular public education. Public education is a pillar of democracy. Right wing extremists view authentic history, DEI, and critical thinking taught in public schools as a threat to their absolute control and power. Public schools bring diverse young people together to promote tolerance and understanding. Right wing extremists intend to divide and conquer by demolishing the ties that unite us.
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Retired: In the Trump circus, it’s like he has hired people off the street to do high-wire acts. Then, when they fall, as usual, they blame the messenger, diminish its importance, say “the democrats” are overstating the case, blah blah blah–anything but take responsibility for their utter incompetence, arrogance, and carelessness about well-being of Americans, of the military, not to mention the world.
To the question: “What were they thinking” about discussing war intentions over a public platform, the answer is: They weren’t. CBK
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There is no logical separation between concern for freedom and concern for public education. The strength or weakness of the latter feeds the strength or weakness of the former.
There is some irony in the history of public education. Where I come from, public schools were almost always a vehicle for fundamentalist proselytizing and political defense of the lost cause. As the world of deprivation due to the debacle turned into the world of air conditioning and suburbs, my community had kept the belief that what they experienced growing up: singing hymns in school, celebrating Easter in the classroom, and hearing prayer in schools was common across the country and formed the basis for the greatness of our country. They are the soil from which grew the myth that has become Christian Nationalism. They see the faith that is so important to them reflected in the leaders who so deftly manipulate them for their vote.
Many awoke to different worlds, however, and know that their tiny experiences were only one of many in history. Often moving to cities to find work, especially in the generation that spread air conditioning around the sunbelt and conservative impulses in the body politic, they found that the country they loved could make a place for those who did not have their peculiar experiences growing up. They found that this was good. They often found that their religious-based conservatism was cruel to people. They did not want their children to be taught a cristo-centric view of America, especially since that view was often in conflict with their own deep faith. Attempts to solve the divide between these two views has produced a generation of politicians who like the divide and want to exploit it for their own gain.
The only protection against this erosion of civil liberty is education. We cannot wait for children to experience every single point of view. They have to read. They have to find out that there is the child who is like them, young and dreaming of a future, but possessing of different ideas about religion and society. We have only education to guide us through this agonizing time.
Who could ignore this link? Thanks, Diane. You have made your case.
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Keep on fighting, Diane. We love you.
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Thank you Diane for all you do and for this blog which helps to keep me sane in a time of the worst president of my memory. Nixon was a disaster but at least he stepped down from the presidency.
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Nixon had a sense of shame. He resigned to avoid being impeached.
Trump has no sense of shame. He’s like a mobster. He was impeached twice and wears it as a badge of honor.
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I’m with you! In 1986 I completed a MS Thesis on VOUCHERS at UNO and was influenced in my research by your support (at the time) in them. My interest was before most university professors seemed to know about vouchers. I’d learned about them as an Economics undergraduate student in the 60s. Much later as a PhD Ed Leadership student I learned many other perspectives including from Dr. Joyce E. King, (past president AERA) who assisted me with a Chicago presentation about an African American WWII combat veteran who became the USA’s first, and very successful public school district Superintendent. Yet, his story in the Alabama Black Belt is hidden! We are all continuing to learn! You are correct, and from my point of view, the attempts to ERASE history shows us the authoritarian and dictatorial intentions you write about!
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There is so much Trump on your Blog because education has failed at what should be (IMHO ) its primary function. Jefferson would certainly think that was so, on many levels. “no one can be more rejoiced at the information that the legislature of Virginia are likely at length to institute an University on a liberal plan. convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, & that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree. this requires two grades of education. first some institution where science in all it’s branches is taught, and in the highest degree to which the human mind has carried it. this would prepare a few subjects in every state, to whom nature has given minds of the first order. secondly such a degree of learning given to every member of the society as will enable him to read, to judge & to vote understandingly on what is passing. this would be the object of township schools.” Thomas Jefferson 1805 . Sadly this failure was engineered on both levels of education it was an assault on the educational institutions that preserve Democracy. That assault being the reason I arrived at your blog well over a decade ago. It has become crystal that the Oligarchy driving this assault is not content with the battles they have already won and are going in for the kill.
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Thank you Diane! I was a proud public school teacher for many years and vouchers were proven wrong from the start. I am also very afraid for democracy. Please keep speaking out!
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We are watching the dark works of evil creep into the soul of our nation. We need to resist and bring bright light to our neighbors. Now is not the time to shut down.
Let’s revisit the words of Thomas Paine when he described the crisis our Founding Fathers faced on December 23, 1776.
THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.
He went on to write:
There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one. There are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he succeed, will be merciful. It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf, and we ought to guard equally against both.
We must not stand by and watch this corrupt administration of traitors eliminate the very values that are the foundation of our democracy. These traitors have successfully brainwashed many of our friends neighbors and even members of our own families. These evil works have been slowly creeping into the minds of many over the last decade. Now, instead of clandestine messages via far Right Media,(think talk radio, Fox News, NY Post, Wrestlemania, etc.) they are now fully out in the open.
They are now on your TV openly telling you that they will not obey court orders, they create videos of people being swept out of the country with any due process of law as they are chained that harkens back to the days of slavery, They are destroying government agencies that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, our heath, our children and our national defense.
They are now openly threatening our First Amendment right of free speech by threatening those who dare object to the actions of this corrupt administration. They are working to create a new world order that aligns autocratic oligarchs with dictators that would enslave us all.
Thomas Paine was correct when he described the way towards victory.
I thank God, that I fear not. I see no real cause for fear. I know our situation well, and can see the way out of it….By perseverance and fortitude we have the prospect of a glorious issue; by cowardice and submission, the sad choice of a variety of evils – a ravaged country – a depopulated city – habitations without safety, and slavery without hope
It is time to persevere and strengthen our resolve to resist and destroy evil. Do not back down! Challenge those who support this evil. Now is not the time to shrug our shoulders and shake our heads. Now is the time to be heard, educate, and do not yield to stupidity.
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Well said. So many of our forefathers fought and died for the rights we have enjoyed. We cannot allow corrupt tyrants to expunge them.
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I agree. These are dangerous times. I’m 71 and worried.
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Michael Cohen explains why Trump likes Putin and what Trump really thinks of his supporters
Trump praised Putin in 2016 because he assumed he’d lose the election, writes Cohen, and wanted to make sure he could borrow money from Russian sources.
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump is an authoritarian, racist sexual predator, according to a new book by his former lawyer and confidant, who says Trump admires ruthless dictators and openly mocks the working-class Americans he has duped into supporting him. …
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/michael-cohen-explains-why-trump-likes-putin-what-trump-really-n1239470
This Wiki list of nonfiction books about Trump is in date order. Start at the bottom and scroll up. If all we did was read these books, we might spend the rest of our lives reading them, there are so many. Most of them are warnings from those who worked and know the monster personally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography_of_Donald_Trump
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Lloyd: Thank you for these links. I know several people who need to read them. But also, someone on one of the talk shows said as a passing comment that Trump wants to receive the is after the Nobel Peace Prize. Could that really be true? If so, is there nothing sacred that he doesn’t want to soil? CBK
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Trump probably thinks he will win the Nobel Prace Prize for ending the war in Ukraine, even if it means that Putin gets to keep 20% of Ukraine and the U.S. owns all or half of Ukraine’s natural resources.
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Hi again Diane: FYI, and since I know you get the New York Book Review, I thought I’d mention the article on “The Labor Theory of AI” by Ben Tarnoff (Mar. 27).
The title of the article is a bit misleading because the review covers a couple of works that do deep dives into the history and movements of thought that, in fact, inform much more than AI, but also where we are now in education, right up to Russell Vought’s inordinate influence on Trump through his Project 25.
Plug the timing of your books’ publications into the multi-level timeline in the article, and you probably can gain a bit more insight into just what you were up against in your own writing and movements of mind over that same time period. CBK
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Thanks, CBK.
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Thank you, Diane. When democracy descends into authoritarianism, “public” education means something different than the public education that has been an essential part of this country before the privatizers took over.
What does “public” education mean in Hitler’s Germany and Putin’s Russia and Taliban-led Afghanistan? Democracy needs to survive because under authoritarian/totalitarian rule, what does public education even mean?
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Dr. Ravitch,
It’s all good to have so much discussion about Trump. It’s all related. It reminds me of much in Curriculum Studies that may not seem “school-ish” enough to some observers, but can be relevant indeed.
I suspect some of our problems today may be due to a considerable part of the electorate coming of age during NCLB, where test-taking skills were taught and civics education was largely ignored. Even those who were not students during NCLB may have been influenced by such values. The lack of civics education has been the null curriculum (to borrow a term from the late Elliot Eisner).
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I never find these arguments convincing because it is the Americans who were in K-12 before NCLB – people age 50+ – who are among the worst sheep-following Trump acolytes.
“Middle-aged voters were especially influential in tilting the election to Trump. A commanding 56 percent of voters ages 50-64 cast ballots for Trump, with 43 percent voting for Harris, exit polls show. The candidates were tied at 49 percent among voters 65 and older. The two age groups together comprise well over half of the national electorate, meaning they provided the critical difference for the returning president-elect.
Trump improved his performance among voters among those 50 to 64 by 4 percentage points from his previous presidential run in 2020, exit polling shows. ” (From AARP.org)
Older voters favored Trump, younger voters favored Harris.
But I guess there is an argument that the Trump supporting older voters vote in higher percentages so their civics lessons taught them the value of voting, but failed to give them the critical thinking skills that much young Americans have to be able to value democracy itself and thus like the authoritarian guy who incited an insurrection to stay in office and who promised to rule as a king.
Unfortunately, the civics lessons the pre-NCLB older Americans got led too many of them into voting for authoritarianism and hate instead of democracy and truth.
But seem to be among the low percentage of people on this blog who has my experience – where the 1970s pre-testing, no-APs curriculum I got in my own public high school did not teach the critical teaching skills that I saw among my own kids’ peers, whose education was during the years when supposedly kids were only learning how to take a standardized test. It never rang true to me, perhaps because of the excellent public school teachers in NYC public schools- who were often the ones who taught AP classes.
I am not pro-testing, and I understand that NCLB has especially warped the experience of the most underfunded schools where nearly all students live in poverty. But I don’t see that connecting to the fact that Americans aged 50+ have embraced Trump (and done grave damage to our civic lives) while younger Americans have not.
(But then again, I know I sound like a broken record because I place a lot more blame on the right wing media’s anti-truth propaganda and the cowardly response of the so-called liberal media reporters and editors obsessed with proving they are “fair and balanced” who have normalized authoritarianism instead of practicing good journalism.)
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“Even those who were not students during NCLB may have been influenced by such values.”
This quote from my post may have been missed. I believe the values solidified by NCLB have influenced society (young and old) as a whole. Curriculum and instruction are influenced by what society (in general) values as important. The values leading to and pushed by NCLB lead to viewing test scores as if they were corporate profit and loss sheets. Many of those who were in school prior to NCLB, believed in or adopted the values leading to it.
That said, I don’t disagree with the excellent points in your response. We might also consider learning decay over time for those of us who did have civics education. Of course there is also the influence of the media, and I share your lamentation.
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Thank you for this thoughtful reply.
I agree with your very good point about the excellence of values. But I guess I see much better values among young people, so I am more skeptical of the connection between NCLB influencing a much older generation to have bad values while the kids educated under NCLB are more likely to keep their values.
I think we are in agreement about how our culture has been terribly warped by the greed is good, winners good, losers bad mentality. And I think it’s likely that is why NCLB (which may have been supported by some good people at the beginning) was totally warped to do great harm to public education.
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NCLB was flawed from the outset because it is based on misguided assumptions about standardized testing and the root causes of test scores.
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Thank you for the clarification, Diane!
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And we are not even, yet, at the nadir. Things are going to get really, really, really bad.
And Vladimir the Defenestrator is laughing his twisted laugh through it all.
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Am I the only ordinary citizen who has spoken out against the malignant narcissist that suspects they’ve been put on a hit list and targeted by MAGAts, despite criticizing him anonymously? There are a number of reasons why I think this, but one of them is the fact that, although I’m nobody important and I didn’t allow people to follow me without my permission where I’ve posted (including on Twitter/X –and I cancelled that last November), I live in a big blue city and yet the last five or more packages that were sent to me through the mail, from different sources and places across the country, after landing in my city, were then rerouted to a red or purple state, so I was uncertain if I’d ever get them. Although eventually they did arrive, it was not when they were scheduled to come and some did look like they had been opened. Since this is something new and unusual, I can’t explain otherwise why it keeps happening. (Could USPS have just become incompetent around here lately?) There are other personal reasons, too, but I’m afraid that, for the cult, describing them might ensure I’m a target.
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It’s easy to feel paranoid these days. Trump is punishing anyone who criticized him. Law firms, the media.
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Thanks, Diane. I keep thinking about how fortunate we are to still have you and your blog.
It’s not a challenge to feel like our 1st Amendment rights are slipping away though. Politicians have stretched those rights for themselves, such as to allow incessant lies, but that’s like crying “fire” in a crowded theater when there is no fire. They are government officials and those lies have nothing to do with national security. Their deceptions are personally and politically self-serving, so they should not really be protected. It’s especially disheartening when, meanwhile, truth telling is at such high risk… Such scary times!
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These are scary times. Our “president” is a world class liar. He lies and lies. The FOX and Murdoch empire pretends his lies are true. Millions believe them because he said them and they saw it on Fox.
Biden said we are in a battle for “the soul of our nation.” He or his speechwriter was correct. What will be left by 2028?
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Diane, I refer everyone to your blog as you consistently have the most & latest information we all need (as you have always done in the education arena & even more so now). On behalf of myself & all others (& the others are also national & local groups who hadn’t heard of your blog & now read daily), we cannot thank you enough.
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I second what retiredbutmissthekids said, Diane!!
You are truly a gem and precisely what those who value education and democracy have been in need of –yesterday, today and tomorrow! Thank you ever so much for ALL that you have done and continue to do!!!
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Thank you, RT. You are a voice of sanity.
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From the 6th to the early 13th centuries, a monastery operated on a desolate craig, Skellig Michael, rising out of the sea off the coast of southwestern Ireland. There, during the time that we are no longer supposed to refer to as the Dark Ages–a time characterized by almost universal illiteracy, poverty, continual and breathtakingly bloody small-scale warfare, highwaymen on the roads, wild men living in the woods, and devastating raids by plunderers–a small handful of monks, ten to twelve at any given time, worked in this cold, inhospitable environment on the Northern Atlantic, in small, stone hovels, to copy ancient manuscripts and keep learning alive for a better time. Well, that’s what I am doing. Things are going to get a LOT worse before we see, again a dawn. We are in the second Dark Age right now folks. Keep learning alive. Here, what I am up to:
(3) Free Resources for English Teachers – YouTube
and this:
(3) Philosophy – YouTube
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Suggestion for replacing the unacceptable Trump portrait:
Donald Trump, the Deplorable Blank Template – Imgflip
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Thank you Dianne for your tireless advocacy. The public schools in America make up the most important institution for the preservation of our Democracy. Of course Donald the Incorrigible wants them to wither on the vine. After all, he “loves the poorly educated.”
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