South Dakota is one of the few states that has not allowed charter schools, the schools that are paid for with public funds but managed by private boards.
Democrats oppose charter schools because they take money away from real public schools, which are usually underfunded.
Republicans love charter schools because they own the door to the next step: vouchers. Charters tell the public that schools are a consumer choice, not a civic duty.
I am a proud alumna of Wellesley College, class of 1960. Wellesley literally changed my life. My best friends today are classmates; we meet monthly on Zoom to compare notes. We confess our deepest hopes and fears and stand by one another. I have returned for Reunion every five years since graduation. I love the campus and the memories.
I have supported an annual lecture series at Wellesley that has brought terrific thinkers to the campus.
Not long ago, my sons endowed a Professorship in my name, the first endowed chair in the education department. It is called The Diane Silvers Ravitch ’60 Chair in Public Education and the Common Good. The first person to hold the chair is a brilliant young scholar named Soo Hong.
Last night, after midnight, one of my dear classmates sent this review, just published. It made me very happy.
“I was wrong” is one of the most difficult things for a human being to say. Imagine saying it when you have been a conservative public intellectual and expert on public education for decades. Yet that is exactly what Diane Silvers Ravitch ’60 does in her engaging new memoir, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else.
The author of numerous books about the history of American education and education policy, Ravitch turns to the personal in this volume, describing in depth her childhood in Houston, her experience at a segregated public high school, and her journey to Wellesley College in the fall of 1956.
At Wellesley, Ravitch learned not what to think, but how. She arrived on campus feeling, by her own account, like a “fish out of water.” But the College provided her with brilliant peers, gifted teachers, lively debate, and enriching friendships—including with “Maddy,” Madeleine Korbel Albright ’59. She recounts the hilarity of writing the junior show, Call It Red, and the excitement of seeing Fidel Castro speak at Harvard while she was working as a reporter for the Wellesley News.
A political science major at Wellesley, Ravitch went on to earn a Ph.D. in history from Columbia. As her memoir unfolds, she writes openly of loss—the anguish of the death of her 2-year-old son from leukemia, the painful dissolution of her first marriage. And she writes of love—at an education conference in 1984, she met teacher Mary Butz, who became her wife.
She also writes about intellectual transformation. As an education reformer, Ravitch believed deeply in standards, accountability, high-stakes testing, and school choice. Woven through the book is an account of her transition from outspoken supporter of conservative, market-driven policies in public education to one of their most forceful critics. Like many policymakers of the late 20th century, she saw competition, data, and pressure as levers that could fix public education. Serving in senior government roles, including assistant secretary of education during the George H. W. Bush administration, she helped advance reforms rooted in these assumptions, convinced they would raise achievement and close gaps.
But watching these policies unfold in real schools forced her to confront their consequences. High-stakes testing narrowed curricula and hamstrung teachers. Charter expansion and privatization failed to deliver promised gains while draining critical resources from public systems. Most troubling, education reformers increasingly blamed educators for failures that Ravitch now sees as driven by poverty and inequality. Children—especially poor children—were being left behind.
By the end of An Education, Ravitch emerges as a committed advocate for public schools, professional teachers, and democratic accountability. She followed the facts where they led and changed her mind. In this open-hearted, expansive memoir, she explains why.
A former classroom teacher, Grace is senior associate editor of this magazine
Good news for Kentucky’s public schools and taxpayers! Unlike the Supreme Courts in Ohio and Indiana, Kentucky’s Supreme Court ruled that the State Constitution means what it says.
The court unanimously upheld a lower court’s block of House Bill 9
Justices said charter schools aren’t “common schools” under the state constitution
Public funds for schools outside the “common” system require voter approval
Lawmakers could pursue charter schools only with a constitutional amendment
The court unanimously agreed with a lower court’s decision to block House Bill 9, which would have let publicly funded charter schools open in Kentucky. The justices ruled that charter schools, as they are set up now, are not considered public schools under the constitution, so they cannot get public funds without voter approval.
At issue are Sections 183, 184, and 186 of the Kentucky Constitution, which say the General Assembly must provide an “efficient system of common schools” and that public school funds may be allocated only to this system. The court said charter schools operate outside local school district control, can cap enrollment and are exempt from many regulations governing traditional public schools, placing them outside the constitutional definition of “common schools.”
Many years ago, I visited Kentucky to speak to the state school board association. The walls were decorated with banners from school districts. Clearly, the students, parents, and educators of Kentucky are devoted to their public schools. But the charter industry was determined to plant charter schools in Kentucky, even though the State Constitution requires a common school system.
The Kentucky Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a Republican-backed bill establishing a statewide public charter school system was unconstitutional.
In a unanimous opinion authored by Kentucky Supreme Court Justice Michelle Keller, the state’s high court struck down 2022’s House Bill 9, which would have allowed approved groups to create and oversee charter schools funded with public education dollars.
Keller wrote that the language of the Kentucky Constitution with regard to the “common schools” system is clear on this front. She cited Section 184 of the document, which set up the public schools system. “The interest and dividends of said fund… shall be appropriated to the common schools, and to no other purpose. No sum shall be raised or collected for education other than in common schools until the question of taxation is submitted to the legal voters, and the majority of the votes cast at said election shall be in favor of such taxation,” the section reads.
Keller’s opinion echoed a lower court ruling from Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd. “Charter schools are not ‘common schools’ as contemplated under Sections 183, 184, and 186 of the Kentucky Constitution,” Keller wrote.
Charter schools — schools that are publicly funded but operated by independent groups with fewer regulations than most public schools — are technically legal in Kentucky, but HB 9 would have created a mechanism for funding them with public dollars. The bill legalizing charter schools, but not building in a mechanism to fund them, was passed in 2017 as a priority bill under then-Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican.
Since defeating Bevin in 2019, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear has been a staunch opponent of funding charter schools.
Keller wrote that the court’s opinion does not amount to an evaluation of the policy arguments for charter schools, but rather the plain language of the constitution. “We cannot sell the people of Kentucky a mule and call it a horse, even if we believe the public needs a mule,” she wrote.
The law labeled charter schools as part of the state’s public education system but exempted them from many statutes and regulations governing traditional local school districts.
Keller wrote that the “public” label on those schools was something of a misnomer. “Our precedent… requires the system to be ‘unitary and uniform’ and not duplicative. It does not allow for a parallel system which is not within the common school system. A system that calls itself ‘public’ must be accountable to the public. Simply putting the label ‘public’ on something does not make it such,” Keller wrote.
Stephen Dyer, former legislator and critic of school privatization in Ohio, explains here how a Republican-sponsored bill will hit Republican districts hardest.
It’s no secret that over the last decade, Ohio has gone from a battleground state to a pretty red one, especially when Donald Trump is on the ballot. The major swing that occurred between 2006 when Democrat Ted Strickland won 70+ counties and 2024 has occurred in rural and urban counties, especially around the Mahoning Valley.
Gov. Ted Strickland’s 2006 victory map
President Donald Trump’s 2024 victory map
So what does the Ohio GOP do this year, which is shaping up to be a tough year for them anyway, to hold onto their Trump coalition?
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Try this: Introduce a bill that would, if passed, require folks living in Mahoning County to increase their property taxes by an average of $2,300 per $200,000 home and Trumbull County by $1,886, or close their kids’ schools.
During a year where everyone is so pissed about property taxes being high that they want to actually get rid of property taxes.
Yeah. Pretty stupid, right?
Why would they do something so stupid, you ask?
So they can maintain an unconstitutional private school tuition subsidy that lets Les Wexner — the guy who was best buddies with Jeffrey Epstein —get a taxpayer funded break on his private school tuition bill.
I can’t make up this shit, man.
These guys obviously think they’re politically invincible.
I ran some more analysis of the bill that Callender introduced (who was Ohio Charter Schools’ go to lawyer prior to returning to the House a few years ago), which would block state aid to any school district that’s suing the state over its private school tuition subsidy, which, again, has been found to violate the Ohio Constitution.
Needless to say, the results are not awesome.
The average Ohio school district would have to go for a levy that runs about 32 mills and would cost a homeowner of a $200,000 home an additional $2,200 a year. And that’s only if they want to keep their kids’ schools open.
Because scores, if not hundreds, of school districts would cease operating under this bill
As you can see, the impact is worst for urban districts, but rurals are really hammered too.
This data is using the most recent Ohio Department of Education District Profile Report (for income and millage) and the most recent District Payment report for February 2026
I mean, you’re going to have poor, small town¹communities having to contemplate losing an additional 5% or more of their income to pay for Les Wexner’s private school tuition cut? That’s what you’re going with? This year?
Some other tidbits:
Trimble Local in Athens County would have to raise their property taxes by a staggering $11,355 per $200,000 home to replace the extorted money. That’s a 162.26-mill levy to raise what amounts to 23% of the average district resident’s income.
Steubenville — the home of Dean Martin and a famously Trump-y area — would need to go for a 119-mill levy, costing the $200,000 homeowner another $8,350 per year, which is 16% of the average family’s income there.
There are 56 Ohio school districts that would need to go for 50-mill levies or higher to replace the state aid Callender wants to cut. Or those kids — all 137,455 of them — will no longer have schools.
There are families in 22 Ohio school districts that would have to give up 10% or more of their average income to make up for Callender’s proposed cuts.
The average share of the cost in these districts that’s borne by the state is 47%. So the “you need to tighten your belt” argument ain’t working for these districts.
All so Les Wexner can get his private school tuition subsidized.
I could go on. I posted the spreadsheet here, in case you want to look at more of these just amazing consequences. Not every school district has joined the lawsuit. So these data only apply to those who have. But there are so many of them (@300, or half of all Ohio school districts) that you can extrapolate the results. If every district joined, the effect would be nearly identical to what’s happening in those that have already.
I will say that this bill is clearly unconstitutional. I don’t know how the state will argue that removing funding from 700,000 students is going to provide those same students with a thorough and efficient system of common schools, as the Ohio Constitution mandates.
So, in short, there is simply no way this bill survives even a modicum of legal scrutiny. So the chances of this happening are next to nothing.
Bu then if it’s clearly unconstitutional, as Callender must know it to be, then why do it? Scare local school districts form joining the lawsuit, or leaving it? Fat chance of that happening. I’ve been hearing districts and, more importantly, parents are more pissed now than they were before.
Like I said earlier, this is quite a play for Callender to make in an already tough political environment 9 months from an election that is expected to be focused on affordability and corruption.
But hey. It’s worked for these guys before and they keep winning in gerrymandered districts.
So why change now, right?
1. These district types are ones developed by the Ohio Department of Education, not me.
Back in the late 1980s, when charter schools were a brand new idea, advocates said that charter schools would be more accountable, cost less, and would get better results.
It was also speculative, since no charter schools existed then. I believed it would turn out that way, as did other proponents of charter schools.
But none of those beliefs/hopes panned out.
We now know that charter lobbyists oppose accountability in state legislatures.
We now know that charter schools do not get better results than public schools, unless they exclude the kids who get low test scores.
We now know that charter schools do not cost less. Many of their leaders are paid more than public school leaders (some are paid $1 million a year). They lobby legislatures to give them the same funding as public schools. In some states, charters have won the power to locate rent-free in public school buildings.
Peter Greene here explains that the charter industry is seeking federal legislation to underwrite the cost of charter school facilities. The federal Charter School Program already provides $500 million a year to start new charter schools or expand existing ones. This grand gift, which the Trump administration increased, ignores the fact that demand for charter schools has declined while charters continue to close because of falling enrollments.
Among the various bills thrown at Congress is one that finds new ways to throw public money at charter schools.
HB 7086, the “Equitable Access to School Facilities Act,” proposes to send money to charter operators, via the state, to buy and build facilities for schools.
The cost of coming up with a building to put charter schools in might seem like part of the cost of being in the charter school business, but charter operators don’t much care for having to fork over the money. In some states, legislators have solved the problem by just allowing charter schools to just take public property. Florida is rolling out a law that lets charters take public school real estate in whole or in part just by saying, “Hey, we want that.” It’s an extraordinary law, sort of like the opposite of eminent domain, in which the facilities that taxpayers have bought and paid for suddenly belong to a private business.
HB 7086 wants to propose a similar federal solution, delivering grants to any states that come up with clever ways to gift taxpayer dollars to charters that want to build or buy some facilities, or want to come up with fun ways for charters to grab taxpayer-funded buildings.
The bill comes courtesy of Rep. Juan Ciscomani, an Arizona Republican, who just wants to make sure that every school is a great school. In a press release, he explains:
Sadly, access to appropriate and affordable school buildings for charter schools continues to be one of the biggest barriers to growth. Unlike district schools, charter schools aren’t guaranteed access to school buildings or traditional access to facilities funding sources like local property tax dollars.
Yeah, I was going to open a restaurant, but access to food and cooking supplies was a big barrier to growth, so maybe the taxpayers would like to buy that stuff for me?
Or maybe when you decide to go into a business, you do it with a plan that takes into account the cost of being in that business. Certainly the notion that building and financing facilities is easy peasy for public school systems is disconnected from reality. When West Egg Schools want a new building, they have to convince the taxpayers or else that school board will find themselves voted out of office.
If you want to get into the charter school biz, you need a plan about how you’ll manage the cost of getting into the charter school biz. “Well, get the feds to drain taxpayers to fund it for us,” is not such a plan.
The bill does display one of the lies of the charter movement– that we can finance multiple school systems with the same money that wasn’t enough to fund one. Not that I expect any choicers to say so out loud. But no school district (or any other business) responds to tough money times by saying, “I know– let’s build more facilities.” The inevitable side effect of choice systems is that taxpayers end up financing redundant facilities and vast amounts of excess capacity, which means taxpayers have to be hit for even more money. Legislators continue to find creative ways to A) ignore the issue and B) legislate more paths by which taxpayer money can be funneled to choice schools.
This bill hasn’t died yet. Tell your Congressperson to drive a stake through its heart.
In addition to blogging at Curmudgucation, Peter Greene is a Senior Contributor to Forbes, where this review appeared.
He reviewed my book in Forbes. You may be tired of seeing the wonderful reviews of my book by fellow bloggers. I agree with you….but…the book has been overlooked by the mainstream media. It is the first book I have published that was not reviewed by the New York Times.
I am thrilled that well-informed bloggers have taken the time to read and review it.
Peter Greene writes:
Diane Ravitch is one of the biggest turncoats in education policy history, and American education is better for it.
She tells the story in her newest book, her memoir An Education. From humble beginnings in Houston, she moved on to Wellesley, where she rubbed elbows with the likes of future Madeline Albright and Nora Ephron. Upon graduation. she married into the prestigious Ravitch family. Casting around for a career, she gravitated toward education history, starting with researching and writing a massive history of New York City public schools, launching her career as an academic.
She was in those days considered a neoconservative. She believed in meritocracy, standards, standardized testing, and color blindness, and these beliefs combined with her academic credentials formed a foundation for a burgeoning career of advocacy for the rising tide of education reform. By the time the 1990s rolled around, she was tapped for a role as Assistant Secretary of Education under President George H. W. Bush. She appeared in television, met and socialized with top political leaders, enjoyed other odd in-crowd perks like a visit to George Lucas at Skywalker Ranch. She was brought onto an assortment of conservative think tanks, served in various commissions and agencies under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and wrote several books that brought rounds of interviews on major media. She was a committed supporter and promoter of No Child Left Behind, which included all the emphasis on standards and testing that she thought she wanted to see in education.
When she graduated from high school, her English teacher gifted her with two quotes. The second was from Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Those turned out to be prescient words for a woman who was about to engage in a public re-evaluation of her entire body of professional beliefs.
Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor of New York City and brought in Joel Klein to run the schools, and for four years Ravitch watched the ideas she championed implemented, and she saw the down side. She was critical, though carefully so (it was still not common knowledge that she had years ago left her husband for a woman). But she could see that Bloomberg and Klein were “faithfully, if erratically, imposing the right-wing policies that I had once endorsed and demonstrating their ineffectiveness.”
In the following years, Ravitch “step by step” abandoned her long-held views about education. Those long-held views had been her bread and butter, the web that sustained personal and professional networks. And Ravitch was willing not just to break those ties, but determined to “expose the big money propelling the cause of what I called corporate education reform.”
I changed my mind when I realized that the ideas I had championed sounded good in theory but failed in practice. I thought that standards, tests and accountability would lead to higher achievement (test scores). They didn’t. Even if they had, the scores would not signify better education, just a fortunate upbringing and the mastery of test-taking skills. I originally thought, like other so-called reformers, that competition and merit pay would encourage teachers and principals to work harder and get better results. They didn’t. The teachers were already working as hard as they knew how.
Ravitch came to view the punitive attempt to use test scores to determine teacher careers as demoralizing, destined to discourage young people from choosing the profession. The “toxic policy” of high-stakes testing was ‘inflicting harm on students and teachers.”
Ravitch became a key figure in the movement to support public education in the US. She co-founded the Network for Public Education and spoke out repeatedly against the education reform movement. Her blog became a popular outlet that connected many of the far-flung supporters of public education.
Ravitch has written page upon page critiquing the education reform movement of the past few decades, and in the final chapters of this memoir, the reader can find a clear, crisp encapsulated version of her conclusions and beliefs about the top-down government mandates and big-money attempts to dismantle the public school system and replace it with a multi-tiered privatized system. This brisk, readable book provides a historical recap of the ed reform movement and the resistance to it, as well as the rich history of a woman who, more than any other observer, has examined the pieces of the movement from both sides.
The Houston Chronicle exposed a scandal involving Houston’s state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles.
The Chronicle reported:
State-appointed Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles played a central role early in negotiations for a nearly $1 million contract between a Texas charter school network and a for-profit Colorado consulting firm, according to records obtained by the Houston Chronicle.
Miles used his private Gmail during those talks, emails show, sending a proposal with the consulting firm’s cost breakdowns; flagging a major price increase; and directing where contract documents should be sent.
The firm’s services — plus the free use of HISD’s curriculum and training by Miles himself — were intended to help the charter system replicate HISD’s controversial reforms and turn around several of its struggling campuses.
The mystery behind the scandal is why anyone would want to adopt Mike Miles’ top-down scripted curriculum. Its main effect is to drive away students and teachers. Test scores are up, to be sure. Miles’ greatest accomplishment seems to be raising a cohort of trained seals with higher scores who have never experienced love of learning.
Stephen Dyer, a former state legislator, has been watching the performance of charter schools in Ohio for many years. Ohio has one of the worst charter sectors of any state in the country. Not only do the charters do worse than public schools, but they have been embroiled in scandals, especially the online charters.
Why does the Ohio legislature keep funding poorly performing charters? The majority of legislators are Republicans who love school choice, regardless of results. Some take money from the charter sector. Some, like Andrew Brenner, chair of the House Education committee, hate public schools.
Nearly 1/2 of all failing Ohio Report Card grades handed out since 2005 have been given to Ohio Charter Schools, even though more than 3 times as many grades have been given to Ohio Public Schools
After about 30 years of looking at Ohio Charter Schools, I kind of use a shorthand when describing them — notoriously poor performing. And I assume everyone understands what that means.
However, I have come to realize that perhaps a portion of my readers may not be familiar with the Ohio Charter School Wars waged between 1999 and 2017. Since 2017, Ohio’s school choice warriors have focused primarily on exploding the amount of state taxpayer money being used to unconstitutionally subsidize wealthy parents’ private school tuitions.
But Ohio’s Charter Schools have continued receiving huge taxpayer investments — $1.56 billion this year alone, which dwarfs even Ohio’s $1 billion unconstitutional private school tuition subsidy. We now give more state money to Ohio Charter Schools than we give to all 8 of Ohio’s major urban school districts.
Yet Ohio’s Charter Schools aren’t getting all that money because they’re killing it academically. In fact, the state’s current report card reveals pretty much what it always has revealed — Ohio’s Charter Schools perform far worse than Ohio’s public school districts.
Charter advocates have always hated having their schools’ performance compared with Ohio Public School Districts. They have insisted that their schools’ performance should be compared solely with the performance of a handful of the most struggling public schools in Ohio’s urban core, despite the fact that Ohio Charter Schools take students from nearly every Ohio public school district — including Charter Schools in Ohio’s urban core.
For example, Breakthrough Charter Schools in Cleveland (which at one time was the best-performing Charter School chain in the state) take about 75% of their kids from Cleveland Municipal School District. The rest come from surrounding suburban districts.
Charter schools don’t get to cherry pick their students, take funding from all Ohio public school students, be considered a “district” for federal funding purposes, then have their performance compared with a handful of the most struggling urban school buildings.
Sorry.
If you take $1.56 billion from every public school kid and 126,000 students from nearly every Ohio public school district, your performance will be compared with every Ohio public school district.
You’re big boys now. Your students get more state funding than 97% of Ohio’s public school students. You’ve been around since 1998. You’re no longer the experiment; you’re the status quo. And, I’m sorry, but you guys are sucking something awful.
To read the abysmal facts about Ohio’s charter schools, open the link.
In 2023, the state of Texas took control of the Houston Independent School District because of an absurd state law that allows a state takeover of an entire district if only one school is “failing” for five years. In Houston, that one school was Phyllis Wheatley High Schol, which had disproportionately high numbers of students with disabilities, English language learners, and impoverished students. Wheatley was improving, but not enough to avert the takeover.
HISD went to court to block the takeover by the state, but eventually lost in 2023.
The State ousted the board and installed a new superintendent, former military officer Mike Miles, who had had a rocky tenure as superintendent in Dallas (teachers left in droves in response to Miles’ autocratic style.) Miles also started charter schools.
Miles imposed a standardized “New Education System” and ousted experienced (but noncompliant) principals.
HISD enrolls about 168,400 students this year. It has lost 13,000 students since the takeover in 2023. Enrollment is growing in other districts, not declining.
Loss of enrollment means loss of state and federal funding.
The biggest enrollment losses occurred in schools closely implementing Mike Miles’ mandates. Researchers “found that campuses strictly implementing reforms lost more students. Certain magnet and specialty program schools with more autonomy gained students.”
Researchers said that this exodus from public schools to charter schools did not happen statewide.
The exodus of experienced teachers has led to a sharp increase in first-year teachers and uncertified teachers. The number of first-year teachers increased by 562 teachers, or 64.7%, since the takeover, according to the UH research center…
Area school districts and charters are hiring more HISD teachers after the first year of the takeover than they did previously, according to the report. Fort Bend ISD hired the most former HISD teachers, bringing on 207. Katy ISD ranked second in 2024–25, followed by Cypress-Fairbanks ISD.
“The increase in uncertified teachers and the increase of novice teachers … that increase was greater in HISD than the other districts surrounding it,” Templeton said.
Teacher turnover soared in Dallas when Mike Miles became Superintendent. In his first year, he ruled as an autocrat, and nearly 1,000 teachers quit. Over his three years, the rate of teacher resignations increased from the low teens to about 22% annually.
Diane Ravitch's blog 