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Miami-Dade Board Reluctantly Approves Five Schools for Controversial NYC Charter Chain

By dianeravitch
April 27, 2026 //
8

Success Academy (originally called Harlem Success Academy) wil open five charter schools in Miami. The board had the paperwork for only one day, but were pressured to make a decision or have the decision made by a special magistrate.

SA is run by Eva Moskowitz, a former New York City Council member. She has nearly 60 charter schools in NYC. The chain is amply funded by billionaires, including several Wall Street titans.

Her debut in Miami is facilitated by a gift of $50 million by billionaire Ken Griffin.

Under a law passed recently, SA is authorized to move into any school with empty classrooms. In NYC, this is called co-location. It inevitably creates bad feelings between the public school and the charter school, because the charter school–especially SA–is better funded than the public school and has better everything.

Moskowitz hopes to enroll 8,000-10,000 in Miami and then expand into other parts of Florida.

Board member Luisa Santos, who represents the district Homestead Senior High is in, expressed concern for what the co-location would mean for students with disabilities. 

“ On paper it may look like we have the seats, but in reality, once I started looking at how you implement this year one and year two, at the specific school in my district, the reality would be that you’re doubling and tripling up some of those highest need students into environments that frankly will become very chaotic,” Santos said.

SA is a “no-excuses” charter chain, which has strict rules about student behavior. It retains the power to oust students who don’t conform to its rules.

It has been controversial in NYC for multiple reasons. For high student attrition; for high teacher turnover; for accepting only students with the mildest disabilities; for ousting students who can’t comply or keep up; for bringing students to legislative meetings at the city or state levels to lobby for more funding for charter schools; for Moskowitz’s compensation (close to $1 million a year including bonuses); and for using a powerful, wealthy campaign PAC to support candidates who back charter expansion.

The students who survive 12-13 years of SA get very high test scores.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Florida, Funding, Harlem Success Academy, Miami

Peter Greene: The Education of Diane Ravitch

By dianeravitch
February 4, 2026 //
8

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.

An Education

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.” 

Her 2010 book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education was a shot across the bow of education reform, signaling a new set of beliefs. “Why did you change your mind,” she was frequently asked.

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. 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Privatization, Vouchers

Jennifer Berkshire: The Schools Are Failing! (Again!)

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2026 //
7

Jennifer Berkshire, keen-eyed commentator on the nation’s schools and their detractors, writes that the doomsayers are up in arms again. After 25 (or 40) years of nonstop “reform,” their lamentations are once again in style. Note that the lamentors never blame the failure of the “reforms” they imposed. No. It’s the students, the teachers, the public schools, anyone else but not themselves.

Berkshire writes:

The kids are dumb and getting dumber. They can’t add or read the books they are no longer assigned, rousing themselves from their stupid stupors only to demand extra time on tests or another (now meaningless) A. The schools are collapsing, thanks to weakened standards and something called “cargo cult equity.” Just how bad is it out there? Today’s kids are the equivalent of the subprime mortgage-backed securities that blew up the economy in the lead up to the Great Recession. (Yes, somebody actually made this argument).

I could keep going, but you get where this is heading. Also, we are only a few days into the new year and I am already exhausted. The point, reader, is that we find ourselves in the throes of a full-blown public education panic. But why now? And why does this one feel different? I kick off 2026 with a look at a story that is all but guaranteed to keep telling itself in the months ahead.

America’s oldest pastime

If you’re new to the great American pastime of bemoaning the state of the nation’s schools then perhaps you’re unaware that we’ve been doing this since at least the ‘70’s. By which I mean the 1870’s. If the railroad collapse that triggered the Panic of 1873 feels startlingly familiar in our own bubbly AI economy, so too will feel the ensuing laments about the schools. They were too expensive. They used to teach reading well, but no longer. They had too many administrators. And if you’ve been following the ‘women ruin everything’ discourse, this was also the time when teaching became a female-documented occupation. Related? You tell me. Over the past 250 years, complaints “that the public schools of today are inferior to those of a generation or two ago” have resurfaced as reliably as measles or whooping cough.

Too many of the wrong kids are in college

Several years ago, education historian Jack Schneider and I wrote an op-ed in which we argued that the GOP was using education culture war to appeal to vastly different constituencies, including rural voters enflamed over CRT and litter boxes and affluent moderates obsessed with getting their kids into elite institutions. Alas, our bleak prediction about the realigning power of this emerging coalition turned out to be premature, but only in the K-12 world. Today, the powerful backlash movement that is upending higher education is based on just such an unlikely coalition, united in the belief that there are too many of the wrong kids in college. As one wry observer noted on X: “Half the education posts are like ‘my kid has a 5.3 GPA and invented $5 insulin and got rejected from DeVry’ and half are ‘60% of freshmen do not know enough math to read the numbers on their classroom doors.’”

Or how about this one? “The Atlantic is Fox News but for high SES liberals worried their kids spot at a UC will be taken by some Latino kid from the Central Valley.” Touché! As Trump et al continue to expand the definition of “wrong kids” [immigrants, non-white students, protestors, poor students, women], affluent parents with an eye on the Ivies, not to mention the pundit class, are proving all too willing to play footsie with them.

Billionaires gonna billionaire

Here’s a question for you, reader: what was your favorite example of a billionaire purchasing state-level education policy in 2025? Mayhaps it was hedge funder Ken Griffin’s purchase of the state legislature in Florida. Or hedge funder Jeff Yass’ purchase of Texas governor Greg Abbott. Or maybe you prefer a more bespoke intervention, like when billionaire Lauren Overdeck rented mobile billboards to warn New Jersey parents that their kids aren’t that smart.

Nobody knows anything

“I Don’t Know What to Think About America’s Declining Test Scores and Neither Should You” was the title of a great post last year by teacher and writer Michael Pershan. Digging into the surging remedial math program at University of California San Diego that fueled roughly one billion hot takes, Pershan patiently pointed out the contradictory nature of the data regarding student achievement in California. Even as student math skills were supposedly declining, state test scores were increasing. Or take Los Angeles, one of the few bright spots in the post-pandemic recovery landscape. During the last golden age of education reform, roughly 15 minutes ago, the progress of LA’s students would have merited its own fawning press treatment. No longer. Today, the story is decline and failure, and while this is a global phenomenon that includes adults, why let a little complexity get in the way of a hot take? The emergence of our ‘hot take’ economy, by the way, in which content entrepreneurs are handsomely rewarded for their “obtuse penchant for moral and ideological incuriousity” (and pay no price for 1) being wrong or 2) contradicting themselves) is a major driver of our current round of public education panic.

Neoliberalism is gone (but not forgotten)

Every year I ban myself from using the word “neoliberalism,” and, well, you can see how that’s going. The story of education decline and collapse that’s now sweeping the land typically goes something like this. Back when we had accountability, standards and choice, things were going great, but then [insert teachers, unions, progressives, lazy kids here] did [insert bad thing here] and the result is [insert calamity here.] But if you’ve been paying attention to education politics for more than 15 minutes then you know that that story is not just partial but wildly inaccurate.

For example, did you know that grassroots opposition to the Common Core standards on the right blew up, not just the era of bipartisan accountability, but helped deliver the current occupant into the White House? The result is that we’re now in an in-between-state, in which the vision of market-minded education reform that has held sway for the last THIRTY YEARS is exhausted while no clear alternative has emerged to take its place. For a compelling explanation of how the crack up of education policy relates to our larger political disintegration, check out this essay by Matt Wilka and Kent McGuire, “A Democratic Vision for Public Schools.”

The neoliberal paradigm has cracked, but it has not crumbled. And this instability marks our current transition period, which has brought much graver threats to American democracy. The confluence of economic pain, demographic change, and new media has proved fertile ground for authoritarian leaders to champion resistance to government.

Human capitalists vs. the chainsaw

Of all of the reading I’ve done in the last month, it was this piece that stopped me in my tracks. The author, a used-to-be copy writer now being replaced by AI, asks an AI chat bot for career advice, to which he is instructed to pick up a chainsaw. I’ll stop here as I want you to read it yourself, but suffice it to say that the author uses his experience to take aim at two sacred cows of the neoliberal era: 1) that more and better education is the answer to our economic woes and 2) that the remedy for worker dislocation is retraining. (For evidence of our muddled moment, consider that the New York Times ran, in addition to the chainsaw op-ed, a Sal Kahn ripped-from-the-time machine argument for worker re-training and a good old-fashioned education-as-boot-straps editorial, all in the same month.)

What does this have to do with our current round of public education panic? For the past three decades, bipartisan education reform has been pitched as an alternative to economic redistribution. Why impose higher taxes on the wealthy when going after the teachers unions is so much more satisfying? But as downward mobility comes for a larger and larger segment of the workforce, that sales pitch has officially run out of steam. The big question now is ‘whither the Democrats?,’ who, to paraphrase the great Tom Frank, have long seen every economic problem as an education problem. Will they seize the populist economic mantle, as even James Carville is prodding them to do? Or will the centrist zombie rise again, flogging the exhausted case that “[e]ducation reform is the seed corn of economic prosperity”? My money is on the chainsaw…

Race science is back

What single silver bullet would cause US test scores to soar like a SpaceX rocket? If you answered ‘kicking out all of the immigrants,’ you would be quoting Trump advisor Stephen Miller. While the claim is measurably preposterous, it’s indicative of the roaring return of race science during Trump 2.0. But Goebbels envy isn’t the only reason for the obsessive fixation on IQ these days. For a forthcoming essay on the Democrats’ populism bind, I’ve been revisiting education historian Michael Katz’s 1987 Reconstructing American Education. In his survey of 100 years of education reform promises and disappointment, Katz identified a familiar pattern. Once the hypes and hopes of addressing an astonishing array of societal ills through the schools inevitably fall short, “hereditarian theories of intelligence reemerge” like clockwork.

Here’s Katz:

As so often in American history, education had been deployed as the primary weapon to fight poverty, crime and social disorder, and, as before, schools were unable to alleviate these great problems whose structural origins lie in the distribution of power and resources.

Katz was surveying the wreckage of the War on Poverty era, its optimism curdling into mainstream social science claims that 1) because IQ was largely inherited and racially determined 2) efforts to boost achievement through the schools were doomed to failure. Today we’re in a similar moment, the exuberant claims of the last education reform era (see above) crashing into the chasm of economic inequality. Katz argued that the only way to challenge genetic arguments, by the way, was to acknowledge “the structural origins of social problems and the inherently ineffectual nature of the reforms that have been attempted.” Sound familiar?

Too many of the wrong kids are in college

Several years ago, education historian Jack Schneider and I wrote an op-ed in which we argued that the GOP was using education culture war to appeal to vastly different constituencies, including rural voters enflamed over CRT and litter boxes and affluent moderates obsessed with getting their kids into elite institutions. Alas, our bleak prediction about the realigning power of this emerging coalition turned out to be premature, but only in the K-12 world. Today, the powerful backlash movement that is upending higher education is based on just such an unlikely coalition, united in the belief that there are too many of the wrong kids in college. As one wry observer noted on X: “Half the education posts are like ‘my kid has a 5.3 GPA and invented $5 insulin and got rejected from DeVry’ and half are ‘60% of freshmen do not know enough math to read the numbers on their classroom doors.’”

Or how about this one? “The Atlantic is Fox News but for high SES liberals worried their kids spot at a UC will be taken by some Latino kid from the Central Valley.” Touché! As Trump et al continue to expand the definition of “wrong kids” [immigrants, non-white students, protestors, poor students, women], affluent parents with an eye on the Ivies, not to mention the pundit class, are proving all too willing to play footsie with them.

Billionaires gonna billionaire

Here’s a question for you, reader: what was your favorite example of a billionaire purchasing state-level education policy in 2025? Mayhaps it was hedge funder Ken Griffin’s purchase of the state legislature in Florida. Or hedge funder Jeff Yass’ purchase of Texas governor Greg Abbott. Or maybe you prefer a more bespoke intervention, like when billionaire Lauren Overdeck rented mobile billboards to warn New Jersey parents that their kids aren’t that smart.

THERE IS MORE! OPEN THE LINK TO FINISH THE ARTICLE. And open the link to see the links to sources.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

Peter Greene: Judge Blocks West Virginia Charter Schools…Because…

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2026 //
6

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2025/12/18/court-ruling-a-roadblock-to-west-virginia-charter-schools/

On December 3, Kanawha Circuit Judge Jennifer Bailey issued a permanent injunction that prevents the West Virginia Professional Charter School Board from authorizing any new charter schools without the approval of the voters in the county where the charter wants to do business.

West Virginia passed a charter school law in 2019; that law stated that charter schools would be authorized by county school boards, or in some rare cases, the state school board. But local elected school boards can be reluctant to open up competing schools funded with local taxpayer dollars (in fact, the very first application for establishing a charter school was rejected by the county board). In 2021, the state modified the charter law. The bill turned every mention of “charter school” into “public charter school,” and it created the West Virginia Professional Charter School Board, a new path for charter authorization.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, West Virginia

Carol Burris: Time to Fix Charter School Laws

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2026 //
6

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, is an expert on charter schools and charter legislation. For the past decade, she has studied the charter school movement, state charter laws, and federal funding for charters and the consequences of those laws and funding more closely than anyone I know.

She wrote the following article, which was published in the current issue of The Progressive:

More than thirty years have passed since nineteen states first embraced charter schools as laboratories of innovation, and the evidence is clear: The model has broken down. Public trust has sharply eroded. School closures are routine, leaving students stranded and families frustrated. And nearly every day brings yet another charter school scandal.

The second installment of “Charter School Reckoning: Disillusionment,” a three-part report by the National Center for Charter School Accountability, reveals that the very structure of this sector—rather than merely isolated bad actors—is what enables mismanagement, profiteering, and instability at high cost to students and taxpayers. The need to rewrite charter laws is no longer a matter of debate; it is a matter of protecting students, taxpayers, and the public trust.

Roughly half of all charter schools by the 2018-19 school year were operated by management corporations, both for-profit and nonprofit. In Michigan, for-profit operators run 70 percent of the state’s charter schools. In Ohio and Florida, for-profits run half. Nevada’s, North Carolina’s, and South Carolina’s for-profit-run school sectors are quickly increasing. Charter schooling is now an industry, not a public school reform.

This growth in corporate chartering has been accompanied by the expansion of complex real estate and contracting structures. These arrangements are not incidental; they are built into the fabric of many charter school laws. In nearly every state, management companies can own school buildings, set their own lease terms, and collect “management fees” that reach 10 percent to 25 percent of a school’s total revenue. Through these related-party transactions, companies maximize profits, siphoning off funding that should be benefitting students.

In every state, authorizing entities that issue charters for schools are responsible for ensuring that the school is fiscally sound, well-managed, and that students are achieving. According to the new report, authorizers “decide who can start a new charter school, set academic and operational expectations, and oversee school performance. They also decide whether a charter should remain open or closed at the end of its contract.” Unfortunately, fee incentives, multiple authorizers, and political appointees to state authorizing boards often make the authorization process vulnerable to corruption and mismanagement. 

In 25 percent of states with charter school laws, four or more types of organizations—including universities, nonprofits, struggling colleges, junior colleges, school districts, and state agencies—are permitted to authorize charters to collect at least 3 percent of a school’s funding. In some states, small and cash-strapped nonprofits and colleges have created charter portfolios that generate millions of dollars. The “Charter School Reckoning” report also documents examples of failing schools that “authorizer shopped” to avoid being shut down, as well as one case of an authorizer who took charter customers on junkets to London and Stockholm.

Charter school board governance also generally remains slap-dash and unaccountable. Only five states require charter school governance to be based on elections. Nearly all other appointments are created by charter school boards’ bylaws, with only a handful of states having any requirements around term limits or membership.

Too often, board members have been sought out by the school’s operator and serve without term limits or approval beyond the board. The Epic Charter Schools case in Oklahoma shows how boards stacked with associates of the school’s founders failed to oversee tens of millions of dollars in questionable spending, with one board member admitting that he was a childhood friend of co-founder David Chaney.

Drawing from news stories published between September 2023 and September 2025, the “Charter School Reckoning” report documented a staggering $858 million in taxpayer funds lost to fraud, theft, profiteering, or incompetence. In story after story, board members were asleep at the wheel, claiming ignorance of the theft, fraud, and incompetence occurring on their watch. Only three states—California, Minnesota, and Massachusetts—“expressly prohibit contracts between a charter school board member and a company with whom the school is doing business.”

The consequences of these system design flaws fall heavily on students and families, with more than one in four charter schools closing by their fifth year and nearly 40 percent shuttering by year ten. And the funds taken from the public school system and taxpayer pockets are irretrievably lost.

These documented patterns point to a clear conclusion: Charter laws in many states create predictable opportunities for profiteering, opacity, and instability. Reform must therefore address the systemic issues that enable these outcomes. The report concludes with ten concrete legislative changes that, if correctly implemented, will reduce fraud and abuse and bring charter schools back to their original mission to serve as laboratories of educational innovation, deserving of the word “public.” Among the specific changes supported by the evidence in this report are stronger financial transparency rules, clear prohibitions on related-party transactions, limits on authorizer fees, democratic governance requirements for charter school boards, and renewal terms capped at five years.

The report concludes, “We can still incubate good ideas, but we should do so where they belong: inside the public system, with the sunlight, stewardship, and community voice that public money requires. Recommitment to that principle—public dollars for public schools under public rules—is the surest way to move from reckoning to repair.”

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud

Andy Spears: “Reformers” Have Indianapolis Public Schools in Their Sights

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2025 //
1

Andy Spears, veteran journalist based in Tennessee, writes about “reformers” plan to undermine and disrupt public schools in Indianapolis.

Indianapolis appears to be the latest front in the ongoing battle to “disrupt” public education so much that it doesn’t exist anymore. 

Ending Public Schools IS The Goal

WFYI reports on a new governing body created to “bridge” the provision of services between Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) and the city’s charter school sector.

In an 8-1 decision Wednesday evening, the Indianapolis Local Education Alliance recommended establishing the nine-member corporation. If approved by state lawmakers, this new agency called the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, would act as a logistical bridge between the district and charter schools, managing unified busing, enrollment, and facility use.

While the IPS School Board will remain intact, the new agency will have significant authority to manage interactions between the Board and charter schools. 

Some see this as the beginning of creating an unaccountable agency to further advance school privatization in the district. 

During public comment, many spoke out against taking any power away from the IPS Board. Some suggested the board should oversee the transportation needs of charter schools. And others painted the ILEA members’ process as undemocratic.

WFYI explains how charter schools work in Indiana:

Charter schools are tuition-free public schools managed privately by nonprofit boards rather than elected officials. These boards operate under contracts granted by one of several authorizers in the state.

A parent representative on the group that reviewed proposals and recommended the new governing agency expressed skepticism:

The recommendation also drew sharp criticism for lacking specifics. Tina Ahlgren, the appointee representing district-managed school parents, cast the sole vote against it.

“I find my biggest reason to vote no is the level of ambiguity in the plan,” Ahlgren said. “I find these recommendations falling into this bizarre zone of simultaneously feeling both too much and not enough, bold in some areas but overly timid in others, with vague promises that the ecosystem will sort itself out.”

The proposal must now be approved by the Indiana General Assembly.

The Indianapolis move comes at a time when national forces are seeking full privatization of public schools, with some in the Trump Administration’s education leadership suggesting public education should all but end within 5-6 years. 

In states like Tennessee, advocacy groups are launching efforts to disrupt public education so much it is effectively a thing of the past.

·And, Indiana is not without its own challenges in maintaining a functioning system of public schools alongside a range of private options.

Indiana Vouchers: Private School Coupons for Wealthy Families

The Indianapolis Star reports:

Indiana’s Choice Scholarship Programallows families to use state dollars that would have followed their child to a traditional public school to instead pay for a private, parochial or nonreligious school.

The state releases this report annually, and for the 2024-25 school year, it showed that the state spent around $497 million on the program, which is an increase of just over $58 million from the previous school year.

Just a few years ago – in 2017 – the Indiana school voucher scheme cost the state $54 million. Now, the year-over-year increase in voucher expenses exceeds what the entire program cost just 8 years ago.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Indiana, Indianapolis

John Thompson: A Stellar Review of AN EDUCATION

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2025 //
2

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, wrote this thoughtful review of my memoirs, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else.

He writes:

Diane Ravitch’s An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else is dedicated to her wife Mary; her sons, Joe, Michael, and Steven; her grandsons Nico, Aidan, Elijah, and Asher; and her ex-husband Richard. An Education intertwines deeply emotional personal and family experiences with the history of how she became such a transformative education leader. Although Diane denies it, I believe she’s the most influential education advocate of the last century.

I’ve been reading Diane Ravitch’s work for decades, but An Education is my favorite book. And my favorite passage started with Diane’s citation of Robert Hutchins who said, “We have to learn to live with those whose opinions differ from our own. After all, they may turn out to be right.”

Then she wrote about Hutchins statement, “for three decades I didn’t realize that it was intended for me.”

Being from Oklahoma, I was captured by the first part of her book, about growing up in Texas. I especially loved her story about meeting Roy Rogers at the Rodeo when she was 9 years old. After Rogers slapped her hand, Diane said, “I determined on the spot that I would never wash that hand again!”

Diane was a tomboy who loved horses and dogs. But she experienced sexism and trauma. She said she “did not have an idyllic adolescence. No one ever does.”  But her teenage years were “destroyed by my father abusing me.” 

During the middle of her book, she recalled her complicated marriage to Richard Ravitch and, then, her wonderful wife, Mary. Mary worked with the progressive educator Deborah Meier and opened a progressive small school in New York City. 

I was especially impressed by Diane’s communication with Al Shanker. He sought to allow teachers to start schools within schools to turnaround kids “in the back of the classroom with their heads on their desks.” Back in the late 1980s, it seemed like he might be able to bring diverse factions together. But, by 1994, charters had been high-jacked by corporate reformers and their winners and losers ideology.

In the middle of An Education. Diane revealed in so much detail the inside stories of her years as a conservative.  Back then, when I was an academic historian, I learned the most about Diane when reading her 1983 book, “The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945 – 1980.” Although I couldn’t yet read her work through the eyes of a teacher, I was exceptionally taken by her calls for teaching background knowledge so students could develop reading comprehension skills so they could “read to learn,” and her placing education pedagogies in a broad historical context.

Diane recalls her support for meritocratic, standardized testing, and color-blind policies, when she questioned bilingual education, and even the benefit of the Equal Rights Amendment. This was the time when she made friends with Bill Bennett, President Reagan’s Secretary of Education, and Chester Finn, and Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander. I knew she had ties to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but I too thought that progressives’ criticism of him was too politically correct. And, until I read An Education, I knew little about the two sides of James Coleman’s research, whose earlier research had seemed persuasive to me.

Neither would I have thought that Chester Finn was like a “sibling” to Diane.

When explaining her then-conservative beliefs, I sometimes felt that Diane was too hard on herself. For instance, she was far, far from alone in failing to understand the wisdom of Gov. Ann Richards, who said, “If there ever is school choice in Texas, the hard-right Christians will get the money to indoctrinate children.”

Moreover, as An Education schooled me on the propaganda behind the so-called “Texas Miracle” it did more than foreshadow the “New York City Miracle,” the “Harlem Miracle,” and the “Mississippi Miracle.”  It brought me back to the decades-long Oklahoma reality when our curriculum and policies were based on Texas’ accountability systems.  During most of my career, our policies were informed by one Texas trick after another to jack up accountability metrics.

Diane served as member of the National Assessment Governing Board from 1997 to 2004, and she would dig deeply into the numbers and the methodologies behind NAEP. But, as she explained, few journalists read the fine print of the research and they wrote “breathlessly” about supposedly dismal results in traditional public schools. They certainly didn’t report properly about the way that students’ outcomes were linked to family income.

When serving in the Education Department, Diane took a lead in establishing national standards for every school subject. Drawing upon excellent historians, multicultural History standards were set. She hoped standards like those would remain voluntary and “unify their respective fields and establish a common ground for a curriculum without telling teachers how to teach.” 

But the conservative Lynne Cheney “published a scathing denunciation of them.” Cheney said the History standards focused too much on people like Joe McCarthy and the Ku Klux Klan, and not enough on Ulysses S. Grant, and Robert E. Lee. This launched the modern wars over curriculum that have become especially destructive under President Trump. 

Even so, in 2002, Diane hoped that Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Joel Klein (who knew nothing about education) would succeed in improving New York City Schools. Klein reorganized schools from top to bottom, with multiple schools per building drawing on funding by the Gates Foundation. (By the way, I saw the chaos Klein created when visiting dozens of hurriedly opened school, especially in Bedford–Stuyvesant. Usually, leaders of the new schools didn’t even know how many new schools were being opened in their building.)

And, even worse, Jack Welch CEO of General Electric pushed 20-70-10 “stack ranking,” meaning 70% of teachers would be in the middle in terms of effectiveness, and 10% should be “removed,” even if it took the use of invalid and unreliable metrics to evaluate all teachers.

Especially after Diane engaged in a seven-year debate with Deborah Meier, which further “broadened her perspectives,” she became an invaluable leader of the grass-roots opposition to corporate school reforms. She objected to top-down mandates on teaching reading. Diane was among the first to explicitly link in a detailed manner the reforms to the wider privatization movement. And she nailed it when identifying them as the “Billionaires Boys Club.”

Diane analyzed the public relations campaigns which sold “reforms” as the “New York City Miracle.” Drawing upon her insights from serving on the National Assessment Governing Board, she clearly explained why NYC schools flipped back and forth between A and F grades.  Then, she linked President Obama’s flawed $5 billion RTTT experiment with the problems with Common Core curriculum and tests that were years above students’ reading levels.

Diane then quotes John Maynard Keynes who said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

Today, Diane changes minds by clearly explaining the interconnections between Free Market ideology, and profits, and the mindsets of elites that push privatization. She also reports daily on the interconnected attacks on schools throughout the nation. And now she’s sharing the same wisdom when spreading the word about Trumpism and today’s attacks on democracy.

I always read Diane’s daily blog posts. And I so very much appreciate An Education, even if it briefly pulled me away from reading everything in the Diane Ravitch Blog.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Equity, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Gender, History, Klein, Joel, New York City, Privatization, Racism, Ravitch, Diane, Research, School Choice, Segregation, Texas, U.S. Department of Education

Gary Rubinstein Reviews “An Education” with Gusto!

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2025 //
2

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.

Categories Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ethics, Hoax, Ravitch, Diane

Jan Resseger: Don’t Believe the Lies about State Control of Federal Funds

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2025 //
9

Jan Resseger recently read Arne Duncan’s cheerful hopes for the Trump education agenda and encouraged the public to look at the bright side. Then Jan remembered Arne’s disastrous Race to the Top, which even the U.S. Department of Education rated as a waste of money, and Jan looked elsewhere for advice. She found Kevin Welner’s sage thoughts.

My view is that Trump, his budget director Russell Vought, and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon ultimately hope to turn all federal funding into block grants to the states, no strings attached. No money dedicated to students with disabilities, no money for schools enrolling large numbers of low-income students. Federal regulations drafted by hard-hearted zealots of the Trump administration will be directed to vouchers, charters, cyber schooling and home schooling.

Don’t be fooled: The Trump administration wants to destroy public schools.

Jan writes:

In a recent column in the Washington Post, Arne Duncan suggested that even Democrat-led states can opt into the One Big Beautiful Bill’s tax credit school voucher program and redirect the funds into public schools or at least into programs that support achievement in public schools as a way to replace COVID American Rescue Plan funds that have run out. “This solution is a no-brainer,” he declares.

Here is Arne’s prescription: “The new federal tax credit scholarship program, passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, allows taxpayers to claim a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations, or SGOs. These SGOs can fund a range of services already embraced by blue-state leaders, such as tutoring, transportation, special education services and learning technology. For both current governors and gubernatorial candidates, it’s a chance to show voters that they’re willing to do what it takes to deliver for students and families, no matter where the ideas originate.  By opting in, a governor unlocks these resources for students in their state. Some Democratic leaders have hesitated, however, worried that the program could be seen as undermining public schools, since private scholarships are also eligible. But that misses the point.”

Remember that Arne Duncan launched Race to the Top, which brought No Child Left Behind’s test-and-punish regime into the Obama years by offering gigantic federal grants as a bribe for states to turn around their lowest scoring 5% of public schools with rigid improvement plans—with the schools that failed to improve being closed or charterized—and with the teachers being held accountable and punished if they couldn’t quickly raise test scores. Because none of Arne’s programs worked out, I am hesitant to take Arne Duncan’s advice.

It is wiser to heed Kevin Welner’s warning in a new policy memo: Governors Beware: The Voucher Advocates in DC Are Not Serious about Returning Education to the States.  Welner is a professor of education policy at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the director of the National Education Policy Center.

Welner explains that the One Big Beautiful Bill requires the governors of the states to opt into the federal tax credit vouchers (or choose to opt out).  As Welner lists how the money can be used, it is clear that the federal dollars can be spent on private education but that, in addition, some programs supporting public schools themselves or their students could qualify: “Under the OBBB, nonprofit Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) in states opting into the program are authorized to pool the donated money and then hand out “scholarships” for students’ ‘qualified elementary or secondary education expense[s].’ This is limited to the expenses allowed for Coverdell Savings Accounts,¹ which are tied to school-related needs, such as tuition, fees, and academic tutoring; special needs services in the case of a special needs beneficiary; books, supplies and other equipment; computer technology, equipment, and Internet access for the use of the beneficiary; and, in some cases, room and board, uniforms, transportation, and extended day (after-school) programs.”

Welner continues: “This idea of ensuring that each state could implement the program in ways that allow all flexibility is consistent with the Trump administration’s vociferous embrace of “returning education quite simply back to the states where it belongs.”  Welner, however, remains skeptical that the Trump administration really plans to return control of federal dollars back to the states:

“Unfortunately, the U.S. Treasury Department rulemaking is likely to deny states the promised flexibility, notwithstanding the administration’s rhetoric about ‘returning education to the states.’ While the law’s ardent supporters may want Democratic governors to participate, they don’t want to give them the flexibility permitted by the law itself… (T)he key issues for state leaders, particularly the governors who will make the opt-out or opt-in decision in most states, involve whether they can shape the program as it is implemented in their states.” Welner lists key concerns for governors and for those of us who have watched the damage done by the voucher programs now established by many state legislatures. “Governors will want to know… if they can:

  1. “Place requirements on SGOs involving reporting, governance, transparency, access, non-discrimination, profiteering, and prioritization of students with greater need;
  2. “Require that schools and other vendors… be accessible to students and not engage in discrimination against protected groups of students, including members of the LGBTQ+ community;
  3. “Put quality-control policies in place to weed out the lowest-quality of these vendors;
  4. “Limit the program to just one or two of the Coverdell categories, ideally research-based options such as high-impact tutoring and after-school programs.”

Welner warns, however, that powerful advocates at the federal level are “pushing hard for regulations that slam the door on any approach that does not further the growth of largely unregulated voucher programs.”

He recounts many of the problems with state level private school tuition vouchers:  Josh Cowen’s research documenting low academic achievement in voucher programs in Louisiana, Indiana and Ohio; the failure of voucher programs to protect students’ civil rights; “free-exercise” justification for public dollars diverted to religious schools; failure to provide programs for disabled students; diversion of massive state dollars to support private school tuition for wealthy students; and states’ failure to regulate teacher qualifications, curriculum, equal access, and oversight of tax dollars.

Welner thinks governors might do well to wait to make the decision about opting in until they can review the formal guidance which will eventually be provided by the U.S. Treasury Department. “(F)or state leaders who are tempted to opt in, that decision could be publicly announced as conditional on the Treasury regulations allowing the state the flexibility to include specified access, quality, and non-discrimination protections for the state’s students. “

He concludes: “In sum, the federal scholarship tax credit may look to some state leaders like an opportunity to secure additional resources for students, but the risks are profound. The structure of the law, coupled with the likely direction of Treasury rulemaking, points toward a program designed not to empower states but to constrain them—pushing states into a rigid, federally controlled voucher system that undermines educational equity and quality and presents long-run threats to the fiscal stability of public schools.”

¹https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/530   The term “Coverdell education savings account” means a trust created or organized in the United States exclusively for the purpose of paying the qualified education expenses of an individual who is the designated beneficiary of the trust (and designated as a Coverdell education savings account at the time created or organized), but only if the written governing instrument creating the trust meets the following requirements….”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, Race to the Top, Shame, Trump, Vouchers

Peter Greene Reviews “An Education” in His Inimitable Style

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2025 //
12

If you have been following this blog for a long time, you know that in my estimation one of the best (actually the best) education bloggers is Peter Greene. Peter taught high school students for 39 years in Pennsylvania. He knows more about teaching than all the experts at the elite universities.

Best of all, he has a keen eye for flimflammery and a great sense of humor. His is one of the few blogs that makes me laugh out loud. He pierces through BS and shysters with ease. And he’s more prolific than anyone I know. Some years back, I devoted every post on one day to Peter’s writings. I consider him to be one of my teachers.

So I was immensely grateful when I discovered that he reviewed my memoirs in both Forbes and, in a different voice, on his blog Curmudgacation.

Here is his blog review:

Over at Forbes.com, I’ve posted a piece about Diane Ravitch’s new memoir, An Education. That’s my grown-up fake journalist piece; but I have a few more blog-appropriate things to say. 

Most folks know the basic outline of the Ravitch career, that she was a recognized and successful part of the conservative ed reform establishment who then turned away from the Dark Side and joined the Resistance–hell, basically co-founded the Resistance. 

I have never heard her talk or write much about what that change cost her, and she doesn’t really talk about it in those terms in this book, but the early chapters show just how in that world she was. Connected to all the right people, welcome at all the right gatherings, in demand as a speaker, and the people–the names just keep coming. Ravitch was in the Room Where It Happens, and not just in it, but close friends with some of the folks in it with her. And she walked away from all that.

I don’t point to that to say we should feel sad for what she gave up, but as a sign of just how tough she is. She looked at the reality on the ground and concluded that she had to change some core beliefs, and having changed them, she had to act on them. If there was more of that kind of intellectual and ethical toughness in the world, the world would be a better place. It’s unusual enough that folks on the privatizer side have often assumed that someone must be paying her off, and a handful of people on the public school side were reluctant to fully trust her. 

There are other details in the book that attest to her guts and hard work. Her first book, The Great School Wars, was a history of the New York City public school system– a massive research project that Ravitch in her mid-thirties just assigned to herself, a project so thorough and well-constructed that she could use it as her PhD thesis. 

There are lots of fun details in the book– imagine the young Diane Ravitch swinging on a rope ladder outside a Wellesley dorm room where a formal dinner was in progress.

The book tells the story of how she got there, how she concluded that the policies that she had believed in were simply not so. And again– many another person would have at that point either kept going through the motions, or retreated to a quiet cave, but Diane instead became an outspoken critic of the very policies, organizations, and people who had been her professional world.

Back in the early 2010s, I was a high school English teacher in a quiet rural and small town corner of Pennsylvania. I knew things were happening in education that just felt really wrong, and I went searching for answers. What I found was Diane Ravitch’s blog, which was like a gathering place for many voices of advocacy for public school. It was where I found many writers who could help me make sense of things like Common Core and NCLB’s undermining of public education. 

There are several people who were responsible for my finding an audience (or the audience finding me) but it was Diane’s blog that got me my earliest connections to audiences. I didn’t know any of these folks, didn’t have any of the connections that hold together movements. At my first NPE conference, the most common question I got was some version of “Who the heck are you and where did you come from?” Diane’s network had made it possible for me to find my connections with a larger movement.

I’m just one example of how Diane’s extraordinary generosity in sharing her platform allowed all sorts of supporters of public education from all across the country to connect and support each other. It’s a notably different approach to leadership than, say, making a movement all about yourself in an attempt to collect personal power on the backs of followers instead of lifting everyone up to be a leader and activist in their own little corner of the world.

The book provides part of answer to where a person like Diane comes from, where that kind of intellectual and ethical courage and diligence come from. And it also provides a clear, compact explaining of where modern ed reform has gone wrong, from the toxic test-and-punish approach of NCLB to the billionaire-driven privatization push to the culture panic debates currently raging. If you want to hand someone a quick simple explainer of what has gone wrong, you can do worse than the last few chapters of this book.

At 223 pages, this is a brisk read but an illuminating one. I highly recommend it

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers
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