Gary Rubinstein is a teacher of mathematics at Stuyvesant High School in NYC and a prominent critic of corporate reform. He started his career as one of the first corps members of Teach for America. After many years inside the reform world, he saw its flaws and became an apostate. Like me. With his superb mathematical skills, he has debunked charter school “miracles,” TFA data, the Tennessee Achievement School District, which did a lot of boasting but failed.

His review is a delight to read.

He writes:

Fifty years after the publication of her first book, ‘The Great School Wars’, author and historian Diane Ravitch has released her long awaited memoirs.  In ‘An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else’ Ravitch takes us through her life from her childhood in Houston through the ups and downs of a long and productive life driven by truth and integrity.

What makes this book a ‘must read’ is that it has the three elements that a great autobiography should.  First, her life story is interesting on an objective level.  Anyone picking up the book and reading over the book jacket will know that Ravtich is someone who achieved fame and notoriety through the unlikely passion of the history of Education in America.  But in this book we learn about the sorrow she had to endure between her great triumphs.  So her story, even if it weren’t so well written, would make a very good book.  A second component of a great autobiography is the author’s ability to reflect on 80 plus years of life and find the pivotal moments that changed the course of her life.  But for an autobiography to be ‘great’ it must be infused and brought to life with excellent precise writing.  As ‘An Education’ has all three aspects, this is a book you are going to want to read and then keep to re-read over the years when you are in need of inspiration.

If you have read any of Ravitch’s education books, you know that she is a master of absorbing decades of events and processing them and creating an insightful, and incredibly efficient, thesis which she develops over the course of a book.  As she explains in this book, she learned her craft while writing as a journalist for The Wellesley News and then for The New Leader magazine.  In all her books she exhibits this efficient technique that would make Strunk and White beam.  But, by design, Ravtich’s books on Education are stripped of emotional language.  Those books educate you through a series of well chosen facts that lead you to understand the implications and big moments without having to spell out every detail.  The big question, which this new book answers with an emphatic ‘Yes’ is whether or not her kind of writing can be used to evoke the joy and the sorrow she experienced through her full 87 years of living.

When I started reading this book, I would bookmark interesting passages that show her talent for memoir.  Eventually I realized that I was bookmarking almost every page.  So after the first 50 of so pages, I had to slow down on the bookmarking.  Here are some of my favorite moments (I will try not to give away too much).

Since Ravitch can write a full tale in the span of five or six lines, there are so many interesting stories in this book.  As a writer she reminds me of one of those painters, I don’t know so much about painting to know what this is called – maybe impressionistic? – who, rather than producing a full photographic quality image, instead just does the minimal with the paint and brush to convey the emotion and ideas.  This is something that is very difficult to do yet she makes it look easy.

A few pages later, Ravitch relays an amusing story about how as a teen she found a pearl in an oyster and ended up in the newspaper for it and also got food poisoning from eating the oyster:  “The next day, after the newspaper appeared with a  photograph of me in short shorts, identified by name, strange men began calling the house, asking for me and saying impudent things.  That went on for days, along with the vomiting.  My mother was not amused.”  This is so efficient, not a word wasted and it does convey the absurdity and the humor with a minimal delivery reminiscent of maybe Bob Newhart.

Here’s one I liked:  “The only Sunday school teacher I remember was a strapping guy who discussed Bible stories and the Jewish religion with us.  He told us that when he was our age he had run away with the circus.”  Ah, see how great this is?  In the first sentence she sets up the scene.  And then in just a few words tells us the perfect thing to understand this guy.  No more is needed and no more is said.

Throughout the book, Ravitch takes stories and moments that could easily fill several pages and finds a way to convey them in a few words.  For the reader, this has the effect of injecting all the humor and sometimes the sorrow of these moments directly into our brains without it having to be processed and translated in our minds.

Though these two examples are fun and convey the innocence of childhood, Ravitch is similarly terse in her telling of some of the deepest tragic moments of her life.  When these happen in the book, the descriptions are so efficiently written that, like sometimes when bad things happen in life unexpectedly, we find ourselves pausing and wondering if that really just happened.  The matter of fact telling of memorable moments of life, both big and small, happy and tragic, has a powerful effect on the reader.

The book really gets rolling when Ravitch enters college in 1956 at Wellesley.  In one sense she is a fish out of water and then she eventually completely at home with the lifelong friends she made there.  This was a really fun chapter to read as Ravitch has the first of her many brushes with fame, like her friend Maddy – eventually Madeleine Albright.  Just as always, Ravitch perfectly sets up the matter of fact description of her friend’s background and then, in an instant it is revealed who she became known as. The Madeleine Albright story was less than one page long.

One of my favorite parts was the description about a satirical musical Ravitch and her friends wrote for the Wellesley Junior Show.  It was hilarious.  I kind of want to see the full script but her description of it, as all her descriptions, gave us just enough that we feel like we saw the whole show but forgot some of the missing details.

After college, Ravitch starts domestic life but isn’t quite content.  She then goes on a lifelong quest for love and for purpose.  As she goes through different eras in her life, she meets a new cast of colorful characters, some famous, some not, but always relevant to her story.

In this book we learn how she went from being the wife of an influential New York City figure to the influential Dr. Ravitch the Education guru of this country.  As she rises in the ranks, she finds herself in the company of so many famous people — even several presidents, yet she conveys in her telling of these encounters that, to her, it wasn’t such a big deal.  They are all just people.  Anyone who has gotten the chance to meet her in person and see her interact with so many people who are not famous will see that she treats non famous people like they are special and is always asking them questions rather than talking about herself.

One of the funniest anecdotes in the book is when she inadvertently got Isaac Asimov angry with her over small talk related to word processors.  Again, this is only a few lines, but another interesting adventure in Ravitch’s full life that put her often in the room with all kinds of famous people.

While married to her husband, Diane unexpectedly meets her soulmate who happens to be a woman. In the chapter about the genesis and growth of her relationship, they have now been together for almost 40 years, she is able to convey what it means to finally experience the joy of true love.

In the last chapters of the book we learn about the Washington years in the Department of Education and how that came about and what she tried to accomplish there.  We also learn about what it took to renounce much of her work and to follow the evidence into a more evolved system of beliefs about what can improve education in this country.  She lost a lot of friends and titles in the process but she kept her personal integrity and commitment to the truth.

Throughout the book, the theme is that Ravitch is never just one thing or the other.  Is she a education conservative or an education liberal?  Is she straight or gay?  Is she a southerner or a north easterner?  Is she an introvert or an extrovert?  Is she a socialite or a homebody?  And throughout her life she is sometimes one and sometimes the other.  She is someone who defies categorization.  And though in the subtitle she says she ‘changed her mind about schools and almost everything else’ she never changed her core belief that you don’t just stay in the same place just because you are comfortable there.

And like with her, this book is a lot of different things.  On one level it is an amusing and interesting read about someone whose choices led her on an unlikely adventure ending with her being, in some circles, a huge celebrity.  But it is also an inspirational tale of how having values and staying true to them can help you overcome some of the unfortunate obstacles you have to deal with in life.  And though I doubt it was intended to accomplish something else, I think that for many readers they will want to write down their own memoirs after reading this.  Ravitch makes it look so easy to analyze your life, find the key moments in it and write some succinct prose – though of course it isn’t so easy but still a worthwhile task.

After finishing this book, I had an experience that only a few people were also able to have.  In the acknowledgements in the ‘friends’ section, among sixteen other names, there was my own.  I got a chill seeing this, never expecting it.  But this made me think something else, also a lesson, though maybe unintended from this great book.  This book reminds us of the importance of relationships.  Everyone you know has a story to tell.  Some people’s lives may not have the highs and lows of Diane Ravitch’s but for each person, their joys and sorrows are meaningful to them.  And even if they don’t have the capability to write the way Ravitch can, if they could, you might find yourselves in the acknowledgement page for that friend or family member.  So enjoy the relationships you have while you can and remember that you are an important person in many people’s lives.

So pick up a copy today and take a ride through the ups and downs of a well lived life.  Though she has made a career of writing about education and teaching, through this book she educates and teaches us that if you keep an open mind and are committed to learning and following the facts, you might end up in a comfortable home a long way from where you started.