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The Century Foundation: The Federal Voucher Program is a Hoax and a Fraud

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2026 //
2

The Century Foundation published an analysis of Trump’s federal voucher program, which explains why it is a hoax and a fraud. The authors are Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra.

The promise it makes is that families and students will choose schools that are just right for them, but the reality is that schools choose the students they want.

The promise is that school choice will benefit black and brown children, as well as children with disabilities, but children abandon all civil rights protections when they enroll in private schools.

The promise is that schools of choice will produce better academic outcomes but typically they produce worse outcomes (see Josh Cowen, The Privateers).

The promise is that school choice represents accountability but it usually means no accountability at all, because nonpublic schools don’t take national or state tests.

Kayla Patrick and Loredana Valtierra write:

Modern school voucher programs are often framed as a response to declining academic achievement and a way to expand “parent choice” by enabling private educators to operate within the public system. But in practice, vouchers operate quite differently than advertised. It’s the private schools, not families, who ultimately decide who enrolls, and they do so outside the accountability systems that govern public education and public dollars and ensure every student has equal opportunity to learn.

The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTCS), passed as part of the Republican Party’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBBA), scales this model for camouflaged privatization to the national level. Though branded as a tax incentive, it functions as a nationwide voucher system that diverts public dollars to private schools while allowing those schools to play by different rules than public providers—evading civil rights protections, academic oversight, and any requirement to provide meaningful evidence to the public of their students’ outcomes.

A National Voucher Program Disguised as a Tax Credit

The FTCS nationalizes a model that at least twenty states and counting –including Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania – have already adopted, one which functions by siphoning public dollars through scholarship granting organizations (SGOs). Under this law, individual taxpayers can donate up to $1,700 annually to SGOs in exchange for a 100 percent federal tax credit, effectively turning private donations into reimbursed public expenditures.

SGOs then will distribute “scholarships” to K–12 students to use toward private school tuition, books, curriculum materials, tutoring or other educational classes, and educational therapies provided by licensed providers. While the program is optional for states, at least twenty-seven have already signaled their intent to participate.

[To see which states have expressed their intent to participate, open the link.]

Despite its branding, this design drains public revenue that would otherwise support public schools—which still educate roughly 90 percent of American students—and redirects it to private, religious, and largely unregulated providers. 

The program model also ignores what parents time and again have told us they want for their children. When given a direct choice at the ballot box, voters have repeatedly rejected school vouchers and related private-school subsidy measures. In the 2024 election, proposals to authorize or expand voucher-style programs in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska were defeated, and historical ballot measure data show that voters have rejected every statewide private voucher or education tax credit initiative placed before them since 1970. This opposition is reflected in polling that shows nearly 70 percent of voters say they would rather increase federal funding for public schools than expand government-funded vouchers, including majorities across party lines.

[Open the link to see which states have held referenda on vouchers.]

Broad Eligibility, Few Quality Controls, and Limited Public Benefit

Even measured against its stated goal of affordability, the FTCS program misses the mark. But if the goal is to make education more affordable for families under real financial strain, this program is also ineffective. Private K–12 tuition averages nearly $13,000 per year nationwide, placing private schooling out of reach for many families even with a modest subsidy. Yet the tax credit is not targeted to families facing affordability pressures. It allows households earning up to 300 percent of area median income to qualify, a threshold that would make roughly 90 percent of U.S. households eligible. In high-income regions, families earning as much as $500,000 per year could receive publicly subsidized support for private education, while in a city like New York—where median income is about $81,000—families earning nearly $244,000 would qualify. At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, housing, and child care, this program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help—rather than toward measures that would help most families, like lowering child care or housing costs.

At a time when families are struggling to afford groceries, housing, and child care, this program directs public dollars toward a limited use—private education subsidies for households that largely do not need the financial help—rather than toward measures that would help most families, like lowering child care or housing costs.

At the same time, the program imposes no meaningful accountability requirements on participating schools. There are no academic performance standards, no transparency obligations, and no requirement to evaluate outcomes. In contrast to nearly every other federal program serving children, from Title I to Head Start, this is public spending without public oversight. Federal programs historically are monitored for fiscal, quality, and sometimes for safety compliance by the agency with charge over the program. In this case, U.S Department of Education (ED) expertise plays no role in oversight of new national policy for education.1

What State Leaders Can and Cannot Control

FTCS offers a tempting hook for well-intentioned state policymakers as well: Some governors and state legislatures may view the tax credit as a way to unlock new resources for priorities like tutoring or after-school programs. In practice, however, it offers no new, flexible funding for states and gives them little control over how public dollars are used. The law defines “scholarship-granting organizations” so broadly that states cannot meaningfully restrict eligibility, set standards, or influence whether funds flow primarily to high-cost private schools rather than unmet public needs.

Once a state opts in, its role is largely administrative and unfunded. States receive no resources to carry out oversight, cannot impose safeguards, and must submit eligible organizations to the U.S. Treasury without authority to shape program design or accountability. Far from being additional education funding that states need, opting in requires that states absorb the fiscal, administrative, and equity consequences of a federal program they are unable to direct or correct. It is not “free money” for states. The opt-in decision is therefore the only meaningful leverage states have—and governors should use their right to refuse to play along in order to protect their public education systems.

Why Oversight and Accountability Matters

Public funding should never function on a good-faith system. It’s very simple: in good policymaking, whenever taxpayer dollars are allocated, oversight measures are put in place to make sure those dollars are spent in the way intended. We already know from numerous examples in the school choice policy space itself that no accountability means that those who need the help the least receive the most benefit.

Eighteen states have a universal private school choice program. Unfortunately, states that have expanded vouchers or education savings accounts with minimal oversight have already seen waste, fraud, and abuse. Arizona’s universal Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, for instance, has minimal controls, audit practices that automatically approve reimbursements, and has been linked to purchases of non-educational items like diamond rings, televisions, and even lingerie with taxpayer funds, prompting investigations by the state attorney general. Rather than lowering costs for families, the program has generated ballooning expenses for the state and contributed to a growing budget crisis—with no measurable benefit to students at all.

Similarly, the federal Charter Schools Program has repeatedly been shown to lack meaningful accountability, with investigations and audits documenting hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on schools that never opened or closed prematurely, and charter networks facing conservatorship over financial mismanagement and self-dealing. These outcomes are the predictable result of public dollars flowing to private operators without meaningful oversight.

Decades of research on voucher programs show mixed or negative academic outcomes, particularly in math and reading, and no evidence that vouchers close opportunity gaps. In Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio, studies found declines in student achievement following expansions in voucher programs. Students in Louisiana’s voucher program experienced drops in both math and reading in their first two years, while voucher students in Indiana and Ohio performed worse than comparable peers who remained in public schools. 

The program nationalizes an unproven experiment while insulating it from the very safeguards that exist to protect students and taxpayers alike.

Taken together, these examples underscore why oversight and accountability are not optional when public dollars are at stake. The FTCS program includes no meaningful accountability, evaluation, or research requirements to justify an estimated $26 billion cost to taxpayers. Without data on student learning, fiscal integrity, or long-term outcomes, the public has no way to assess whether this investment is helping students or simply reshuffling them across systems while diverting resources away from the public schools that serve most children and toward unknown corporate interests.2 In effect, the program nationalizes an unproven experiment while insulating it from the very safeguards that exist to protect students and taxpayers alike.

Who Profits When Public Dollars Become Private Subsidies?

Another consequence of turning public education dollars into private subsidies is that it creates a lucrative marketplace for the companies that manage these voucher systems. A handful of firms have seized on state voucher expansions to secure multimillion-dollar contracts, turning what was pitched as a cost-saving policy into a business opportunity for tech and finance intermediaries. These companies often have limited experience running education programs, and in some states have faced scrutiny over operational problems, questionable spending controls, and high administrative costs. 

This track record raises questions about whether families truly benefit from FTCS’s model. It would seem the opposite: it diverts taxpayer dollars into private profit streams instead of lowering education costs for struggling families. Instead of more wasteful government contracts, these dollars should be used to improve neighborhood schools by hiring high-quality educators, increasing after school programs, expanding pre-K, and hiring mental health professionals.

A Tax Policy Not Designed to Support Education

Congress gave sole interpretive authority for this program to the U.S. Treasury Department, deliberately excluding the U.S. Department of Education and its education-specific expertise. As a result, a major national education policy will be implemented through the tax code, with limited attention to accountability, equity, or educational impact. While advocates have urged the Treasury Department to include stronger transparency, safeguards, and state authority, it is unlikely those measures will be adopted to address the program’s core design flaws.

This use of the tax code stands in sharp contrast to prior policies that successfully supported children and families. The 2021 expanded Federal Child Tax Credit helped to lift more than 2 million childrenout of poverty and reduced the country’s child poverty level to a historic low of 5.2 percent. This program will likely do the opposite. Research shows that private school voucher programs disproportionately benefit wealthy families. Consistent with many other provisions in the law, Congressional Republicans have chosen to prioritize a tax break that disproportionately benefits the wealthy, over nearly every other form of charitable giving, such as donations to food pantries, hospitals, or community services.

By incentivizing families to exit public schools, the voucher tax credit also undermines the financial stability of those schools, particularly in rural and high-need communities. Because education funding is largely enrollment-based, even modest shifts can lead to school closures, consolidations, and reduced services. This leaves behind those families who don’t have the time or resources to navigate private systems, and asks taxpayers to reimburse private donations on top of existing public education costs.

Civil Rights Protections Are Excluded

Public schools that receive federal funding are required to comply with federal civil rights laws, including Title VI and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. In 2024, ED received 22,687 civil rights complaints, including about 8,400 related to disability discrimination, reflecting just how often students and families rely on these protections. 

These laws require schools to take corrective action to prevent and respond to discrimination, provide accommodations and services to students, investigate complaints, and offer families meaningful avenues for recourse. This is what public accountability looks like in practice, and its success depends on ED’s legal authority and the staff capacity to respond when families ask for help.

By contrast, the OBBA does not require scholarship-granting organizations or the private schools and programs they fund to comply with these federal civil rights protections, even though they benefit from publicly subsidized dollars. This means that if a student experiences harassment or discrimination based on race, national origin, sex, religion, or disability, families may have little or no ability to hold private schools accountable or seek remedies comparable to those guaranteed in public schools.

Evidence from state voucher programs shows why this gap matters. An investigation in North Carolina found that voucher funds flowed to private schools that were significantly whiter than the communities they serve, reinforcing racial segregation rather than expanding opportunity. In the absence of enforceable civil rights guardrails, public funding supports exclusionary practices that would be unlawful in public schools.

The Cost to Public Schools and Communities

Ultimately, this voucher/tax credit perpetuates a broader pattern of states, in addition to the federal government, stepping back from their responsibility to fully fund and strengthen public schools. Rather than address the systemic problems that perpetuate low-performing schools, it treats educational inequity as a series of individual problems to be solved by sending public dollars to private education. No matter how the administration spins it, these programs fail to prioritize students from lower-income families while simultaneously subsidizing private education for higher-income families. It invites taxpayers to feel as though they are helping children access opportunity, while leaving the underlying inequities in public education unresolved and, in many cases, deepened.

[Open the link to see data on source of insurance.]

This tax credit is projected to cost $26 billion, which is a high price tag that instead could be doing real good in public schools. If Congress instead invested this through Title I, that money would amount to roughly $1,238 per student in schools serving low-income communities. Research shows that investments of this size improve reading and math outcomes. In other words, we know how to use public dollars to help students succeed. This policy chooses not to.

Imagine putting that $26 billion, the lowest estimated cost of the tax credit over ten years, toward Title I, the federal program that benefits most public schools. That would more than double Title I’s current funding at $18.4 billion. Title I’s flexibility allows schools to meet their specific needs to improve student achievement: more teachers, aides, professional development, wraparound services, and more. 

IDEA is supposed to fund 40 percent of each student’s special education each year, but the federal government has never met that promise. Current funding at $14.2 billion amounts to less than 12 percent of the promise. However, adding $26 billion to IDEA would almost triple current funding and completely close the gap. 

We know that the unprecedented funding from the American Rescue Plan and other COVID relief packages will make a major return on investment: every $1,000 invested per student will be worth $1,238 in future earnings. That funding also required states to at least maintain their education budgets at prior funding so that the federal investment would not replace their responsibility and effort, but work together. The FTCS model completely disregards these precedents, and their values.

The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Is a Heist Taken Straight from the Right’s Privatization Playbook

The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship program follows a familiar privatization strategy. It routes public dollars to private actors while stripping away the oversight, transparency, and civil rights protections that normally accompany public investment. Framed as generosity and choice, it instead creates a system in which taxpayers assume the cost while private schools and intermediaries operate largely beyond public accountability.

The program recreates many risks at a national scale. The schools and organizations receiving these publicly subsidized funds are not required to demonstrate academic results, comply with federal civil rights law, or provide transparency about how dollars are spent. Families are left without protections, taxpayers without accountability, and policymakers without evidence that the investment is improving student outcomes.

When public dollars are transformed into lightly regulated private subsidies, they invite exploitation. The Federal Tax Credit Scholarship is not an isolated policy choice: it follows a pattern of policies that weaken, and normalize weakening, public education while insulating private actors from responsibility. History shows where this path leads: higher costs, weaker safeguards, and fewer assurances that public investments serve the public good.

Notes

  1. The Trump administration has taken multiple actions to reduce the role of the U.S. Department of Education, including firing staff and reassigning education programs and staff to other agencies through interagency agreements (IAAs) without congressional authorization. Such actions raise legal and governance concerns and further erode the education-specific expertise, oversight, and accountability that Congress has historically vested in ED.
  2. Under the OBBA, the federal tax credit for contributions to SGOs applies to individual taxpayers. The law does not provide separate federal tax credit rules for corporate contributions; whether and how corporations might participate or benefit may depend on future Treasury and IRS regulations and state tax policies. Many states currently allow corporate contributions to SGOs.
Read more about Kayla Patrick

Kayla Patrick, Contributor

Read more about Loredana Valtierra

Loredana Valtierra, Contributor

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Hoax, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Special Education, Trump, Vouchers

Jennifer Berkshire: The Collapsing Dream of Ed-Tech in the Schools

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2026 //
13

When I wrote a history of public schools in the 20th century (Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms), I couldn’t help but notice a consistent pattern: an infatuation with fads and panaceas, not by teachers but by pundits and education professors.

Teachers struggled with large class sizes, obsolete textbooks, and low pay, but the buzz was all too often focused on the latest magical reform. At one extreme was militaristic discipline, at the other was the romantic idea of letting children learn when they wanted and whatever they wanted to. Phonics or whole language? Interest or effort?

Every reform had some truth in it, but the extremes must have been very frustrating to teachers. There is no single method that’s just right for every child all the time.

The latest fad is Ed-tech, the belief that children will learn more and more efficiently if they spend a large part of their time on a computer.

My views were influenced by something I read in 1984. The cover story of Forbes was about “The Coming Revolution in Education.” The stories in the issue was about the promise of technology. Curiously, the magazine’s technology editor wrote a dissent. In 1984 Forbes published an article about the promise of computers in the schools. He wrote: “The computer is a tool, like a hammer or a wrench, not a philosophers’ stone. What kind of transformation will computers generate in kids? Just as likely as producing far more intelligent kids is the possibility that you will create a group of kids fixated on screens — television, videogame or computer.” He predicted that “in the end it is the poor who will be chained to the computer; the rich will get teachers.”

For the past few decades, Ed-tech has been the miracle elixir that will solve all problems..

But now, writes Jennifer Berkshire, there is a backlash against Ed-tech among parents and teachers.

They may have realized that the most fervent promoters of Ed-tech are vendors of Ed-tech products.

Berkshire, one of our sharpest observers of education trends, describes the backlash:

Stories about parents rebelling against big tech are everywhere right now. They’re sick of the screens, the hoovering up of their children’s data, and they view AI and its rapid incursion into schools as a menace, not a ‘co-pilot’ for their kids’ education. This is a positive development, in my humble opinion, especially since the backlash against the tech takeover of schools crosses partisan lines. Meanwhile, pundits and hot takers are weighing in, declaring the era of edtech, not just a failure, but the cause of our failing schools.

Which raises a not insignificant question. Now that everyone who is anyone agrees that handing schools over to Silicon Valley was big and costly mistake, how did the nation’s teachers and students end up on the receiving end of this experiment in the first place? And here is where our story grows murky, dear reader. In fact, if you’re old enough to remember the absolute mania around ‘personalized learning’ that took hold during the Obama era, count yourself as fortunate. Because lots of the same influential, not to mention handsomely compensated, folks who were churning out ‘reports’about our factory-era schools 15 minutes ago, suddenly seemed cursed by failing memories.

The not-so-wayback-machine

If you need a refresher to summon forth the 2010-era ed tech frenzy, proceed directly to Audrey Watters’ unforgettable write-up: “The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade.” Watters’ has moved on to a new newsletter and AI refusal, but her once lonely voice as the ‘Cassandra’ of education technology remains as essential as ever. Her tally of “ed-tech failures and fuck-ups and flawed ideas” is studded with now tarnished silver bullets that promised to transform our factory-era schools into futuristic tech centers, making a pretty penny in the process: AltSchool, inBloom, Rocketship, Amplify, DreamBox, Summit… The names have changed or been forgotten but the throughline—a fundamental misunderstanding of schools and teaching combined with the promise of hefty returns—remains constant.

My own introduction to the ed tech hustle came back in 2015. Jeb Bush’s annual convening for his group, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, or FEE, to use its comically apt acronym, came to Boston. To which I said, ‘sign me up!’ Always an early adapter (see, for example, school vouchers in Florida), FEE was unabashedly pro technology, as I wrote in a story for the Baffler.

It’s one of FEE’s articles of faith that the solutions to our great educational dilemmas are a mere click away—if, that is, the schools and the self-interested dullards who run them would just accept the limitless possibilities of technology. Of course, these gadgets don’t come cheap. And this means that, like virtually all the other innovations touted by our postideological savants of education reform, the vision of a tech-empowered American student body calls for driving down our spending on teaching (labor costs account for the lion’s share of the $600 billion spent on public education in the United States each year) and pumping up our spending on gizmos.

In virtually every session I attended, someone would relate a story about a device that was working education miracles, followed by a familiar lament: if only the teachers, or their unions, or the education ‘blob’ would get out of the way. 

False profits

In a recent piece for Fortune, reporter Sasha Rogelberg offers an interesting origin story for the tech takeover of public education. And you don’t need to read past the title to get where she’s going: ‘American schools weren’t broken until Silicon Valley used a lie to convince them they were—now reading and math scores are plummeting.’ I’d make the header even clunkier and add ‘the education reform industry’ to the mix. While the push to get tech into classrooms predates Obama-era education reform (check out Watters’ fantastic history of personalized learning, Teaching Machines, for the extended play version), it was the reformers’ zeal, when married to Silicon Valley’s profit optimization, would prove so irresistible. 

In the last hundred years, the base of the United States economy has shifted from industry to knowledge—but the average American classroom operates in much the same way it always has: one teacher, up to thirty same-age students, four walls. This report from StudentsFirst argues that this one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t cut it in the modern world, in which mastery of higher-order knowledge and skills ought to matter more than time spent in front of a teacher—and that what we need is competency-based education. This approach, also known as the “personalized model,” is characterized by advancing students through school based on what they know and can do, using assessments to give them timely, differentiated support, made easier by the introduction of learning technology.

StudentsFirst, the hard-charging school reform org started by Michelle Rhee, has since been eaten by 50CAN, which now advocates for school vouchers, but the fare they offered up was standard. Indeed, here’s a fun activity for you. Revisit any prominent reform group, individual, or cause and you will find the same argument about our factory-era schools, followed, inevitably, by the same sales pitch for a tech-centric solution. 

Race to the Top, Obama’s signature education reform initiative, didn’t just bribe cash-strapped states to overhaul their teacher evaluation systems. It also ‘encouraged’ states to shift their standardized tests online. And Arne Duncan and Obama’s Department of Education actively courted the tech industry, encouraging them to think of schools as a space ripe for disruption. “Many of today’s young people will be working at jobs that don’t currently exist,” warned the XQ Institute, the reform org started by Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. Today Powell Jobs presides over the Atlantic, where new panic pieces regarding young, tech addled dumb dumbs appear seemingly every day.

Warning signs

My obsessive interest in the intersection of education and politics began back in 2012, when my adopted home state of Massachusetts came down with a serious—and well-funded—case of education reform fever. At a time when red states were crushing the collective bargaining rights of teachers (Wisconsin, anyone?), I was struck by how often reform-minded Democrats ended up repurposing the right’s anti-union, anti-teacher, anti-public-school rhetoric for their own righteous cause. Ed tech sat right smack in the center of this queasy juncture—beloved by liberal reformers, ensorcelled by press releases promising higher test scores, and conservatives who liked the idea of spending less on schools by replacing teachers with machines.

Recall, if you will, Rocketship charter schools, whose innovative blended learning model caused the test scores of its students—almost all poor and minority—to go up like a rocket. Richard Whitmire’s fawning 2013 book, On the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools Are Pushing the Envelope, is a veritable time capsule of the era. Unlike the fusty Model-T schools of yore, Rocketship schools were tech forward. Students spent a chunk of each day in so-called Learning Labs, taking, retaking or practicing taking tests, a practice that had a measurable impact, especially since 50 percent of teachers’ pay was tied to test scores ascending. All that clicking also translated into dollar signs, wrote Whitmire. “A major cost-saving solution was for students to spend significant time working on laptops in large groups supervised by noncertified, lower-paid “instructional lab specialists.”

Rocketship has since fallen back to earth, in part because of stellar reporting like this from Anya Kamenetz, documenting the chain’s less savory practices. But it’s hard to overstate just how excited the reform world was about this stuff. Next time you hear an edu-pundit bemoaning the take over of kindergarten classrooms by big tech, remember that Rocketship got there first. “[K]indergarten teachers are spending less time making letter sounds,” co-founder Preston Smith told Kamenetz. And reformers couldn’t get enough.

Whodunit?

Investigative reporter Amy Littlefield has an intriguing-sounding new book out in which she uses the model of an Agatha Christie novel to suss out who killed abortion rights in the US. I imagine that taking a similar approach to the question of how big tech conquered public education would end up in Murder on the Orient Express territory. That’s the classic Christie whodunit in which everyone on the train ends up having ‘dunit.’ These days, there is a comical effort underway by reformers to distance themselves from the tech takeover—what train? I’ve never been on a train! But the idea that Silicon Valley had the cure for all that ailed the nation’s public schools was absolutely central to Obama-era education reform.

I’d locate the zenith of the reform/tech love affair in 2017 when New Schools Venture Fund, a reform org that funds all of the other orgs, laid down a challenge, or rather, a big bet. At its annual summit, backed by a who’s who of tech funders—Gates, Zuckerberg, Walton, NSVF called for big philanthropy to bet big on tech-based personalized learning. “The world has changed dramatically … and our schools have struggled to keep up,” then CEO Stacey Childress warned the crowd. But not all the news was bad. Going all in on education innovation would also pay off handsomely, claimed NSVF, producing an estimated 200 to 500 percent return on investment. And lest parents, teachers and students failed to adequately appreciate the various reimaginings they were in for, NSVF had an answer for that too: a $200 million ad campaign to “foster understanding and demand.”

As I was preparing to type a sentence about how poorly NSVF’s “Big Bet on the Future of American Education” has aged, a press release popped up in my inbox, announcing that Netflix founder Reed Hastings is joining forces with Democrats for Education Reform or DFER. “Just as Netflix replaced a one-size-fits-all broadcast model with something more personal and responsive, Hastings believes public education can make the same leap.”

AI is a once-in-a-thousand-year shift, and what happens in K-12 is at the center of it. The schools that figure out how to combine individualized software with teachers focused on social-emotional development are going to unlock something we’ve never seen before.

Of course, transforming “a school system in desperate need of reinvention” the way that Hastings reinvented home entertainment will require “governance innovation and political will.” No doubt an ad campaign is in the works too. And convincing education ‘consumers’ that individualized software = school is going to be a tough sell as the Great Big Tech Backlash accelerates.

That’s my big bet.

Categories Curriculum, Disruption, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, History, Innovation, Online Learning, Standardized Testing, Teaching, Technology, Computers, Virtual Charter Schools

Paul Thomas: More About the “Mississippi Miracle”

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2026 //
9

The “Mississippi Miracle” seems to be too good to be true. The scores of Mississippi fourth-graders have risen sharply on NAEP (the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Supporters of the Miracle attribute the dramatic increase to the state’s adoption of the “science of reading” curriculum, teacher training in the “science of reading,” and holding back third-grade students who aren’t reading well enough.

This formula is especially appealing to Republicans because nothing need be done to reduce the children’s poverty or improve their living conditions. Conservative states have hailed the “Mississippi Miracle” because it relieves them of any responsibility to create jobs or change the conditions in which the poor live. It’s a low-cost cure: Just raise reading scores and prosperity will follow.

The story of the Mississippi Miracle also appeals to blue states because they are convinced there is a quick and easy way to end the perennial “reading crisis.” So they too have passed legislation to require all reading teachers to adopt the “science of reading.”

Critics of the “Miracle” say that the practice of holding back low-performing third-graders artificially inflates the fourth grade scores. They also point to eighth grade scores to say that there was no miracle. Eighth grade scores are more important that fourth grade scores because they show longer-term effects of reading instruction.

Paul Thomas is a critic of the “Miracle.”

He begins a recent post with a quote from scholar Bruce Baker:

On NAEP Grade 8 Scores: “a better indicator of the cumulative effects of a system on student learning than 4th grade assessments.” Bruce Baker, February 11, 2026

He writes:

The media, political leaders, and education reformers are making a mistake about reading reform well explained in the parable of the blind men and the elephant.

In this case, many are rushing to make over-stated claims about reading reform in Mississippi by hyper-focusing on limited and distorted data—grade 4 NAEP scores on reading.

First, research details that states implementing reading reform have achieved some short-term test score increases in grade 4; however, those gains disappear by grade 8. And more damning, the determining factor in successful reform is exclusively grade retention policies (not teacher training, reading programs, direct instruction, etc.).

Next, grade retention in Mississippi has been analyzed revealing that retention distorts those scores, resulting in a statistical manipulation of the data and not higher student achievement. In short:

Yet, a new story has emerged claiming that Black students in MS are outperforming Black students in other states, notably California:

This sort of state comparison is grounded in political/ideological bickering that is challenged when grade 8 NAEP reading scores are analyzed instead of grade 4:

Suggesting that Black students are being better served in MS than CA is at least misleading. In fact, Black students in CA, GA, LA, MA, and notably the Department of Defense (DoDEA) schools outperform Black students in MS at grade 8.

Key here is that grade 8 NAEP scores are better data because of the distorting impact of grade retention (usually grade 3) on grade 4 data.

But an even better story is that student achievement among Black and Hispanic students is very complicated, especially when you consider that states have dramatically different percentages of these populations of students.

Further, if we return to the parable from the opening, even better data at grade 8 is not the full picture.

In MS and throughout the US, Black students are still suffering the consequences of the persistent race gap in achievement (most states have the same gap as 1998, including MS).

And Black Americans remain trapped in the burden of racial inequity both in schools and in their communities.

The misleading stories about MS using grade 4 NAEP data are designed to promote a “beating the odds” story—one that isn’t true—but all students in the US would be better served if we chose not to seek those who beat the odds, but to change the odds so that no one—especially children—would have to overcome those inequities in the first place.

Categories Curriculum, Education Industry, Literacy, Mississippi

Arkansas Increases Funding for Vouchers, a Bonanza for Kids in Private Schools

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2026 //
0

Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is holding the line on spending, except for vouchers, which h will get a big boost. About 85% of the students using vouchers never attended public schools, so Governor Sanders is handing out money to pay for students already enrolled in private and religious schools.

Poor people in Arkansas don’t get much help in the budget, but affluent families get tax cuts and vouchers to pay for private schools, religious schools, and home schools.

The Arkansas Times reports:

Arkansas lawmakers are set to convene April 8 to hash out next year’s state budget. In a Wednesday letter to lawmakers, Sanders said she’s proposing a 3% increase, a pretty standard figure on par with recent years.

But what’s going to be funded in this mostly flat spending plan, and what’s not? At first blush, it looks like well-to-do Arkansans are the big winners, cashing in on private school vouchers and more income tax cuts.

Sanders’ proposed 2026-27 budget, presented to lawmakers by Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration Director Jim HudsonWednesday morning, includes up to $379 million for the Arkansas LEARNS vouchers that parents who opt out of traditional public schools can tap to pay private school or homeschool expenses. That’s a big increase over the $187 million budgeted for vouchers last time.

The 2025-26 school year was the first in which all students in Arkansas were eligible for these vouchers, and the price tag keeps creeping higher. Ballooning costs are pretty much a given, based on what’s happened in other states that pioneered this tricky transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to their wealthy overlords by paying fancy kids’ tony tuitions for them. Just ask Arizona and Florida. 

Lawmakers have made a number of adjustments and budget increases for LEARNS after voucher costs quickly exceeded the budgeted amount. In January, a legislative committee signed off on giving another $32 million in one-time reserve funds to Arkansas’s newly universal school voucher program, bringing its total cost in the current 2025-26 school year to $309.4 million, which covers more than 44,000 students. That $309 million is the base amount proposed for 2026-27, but Sanders’ budget proposes an extra $70 million for it, just in case.

Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families warned in January that vouchers are doing all the things opponents warned they would: creating new spending obligations for taxpayers to cover private school tuitions and other costs that were never on the public dime before; chipping away at public schools’ financial resilience; and generally busting budgets. 

These set-aside amounts that were incorporated into the state’s school voucher fund this year, and which are being teed up to be added next year to the tune of $70 million, look a lot like a trap. Last go-round, lawmakers approved about $187 million for vouchers, but then added another $122 million to the school voucher cause in piecemeal fashion over the course of the fiscal year, to ultimately spend $309 million. Now lawmakers are looking at $309 million as the floor for voucher spending for 2026-27, and will almost certainly throw in that set-aside $70 million, too (if not more). How many hundreds of millions more are we going to add in these payouts for the well-to-do each year, in slapdash fashion? Don’t say we didn’t warn you!

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Education Industry, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Dr. Mike DeGuire: The Public Doesn’t Want Vouchers. Why Are They Spreading?

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2026 //
2

Dr. Mike DeGuire is a lifelong educator who served as a principal of a public school in Denver. Now retired, he has assumed an active role in fighting privatization.

The dirty little secret of the voucher movement is that most of them are claimed by well-to-do families whose children were already attending nonpublic schools. Vouchers are a subsidy for people who were already paying tuition at private schools

His post was distributed by Advocates for Public Education Policy.

A4PEP introduced his statement:

Vouchers aren’t winning because voters love them. In fact, they keep losing at the ballot box.

So what’s going on?

In a new post, A4PEP Vice-Chair Dr. Mike DeGuire points to a big driver: billionaire-funded networks that keep pushing “school choice” as a marketplace, where public dollars follow students into private (often religious) schools.

It’s not just messaging, either. These efforts are backed by think tanks, lobbying, and big political spending, and now there’s a new federal tax credit plan that could supercharge scholarship-granting organizations with even less transparency.

If you want the clearest breakdown we’ve seen of who’s behind this and what it means for public schools, read Mike’s full post:

Public education is a public promise. Let’s protect it.

Dr. Mike DeGuire wrote about why vouchers have been winning despite lack of public support.

He said:

One answer: Billionaires

Billionaires Charles Koch, Betsy Devos, Jeff Yass, William Dunn, Phillip Anschutz, Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, John Arnold, and the Walton and Bradley families have led the movement for private school choice through support for both charters and vouchers for over 30 years. Their goal is to dismantle what they call the “government school system” and to change how public education is funded. They want to create a “marketplace of options” so families can use money (vouchers) from public funds to send their children to private, religious, or home schools.

The marketplace concept allows billionaires and their investors to make money through real estate, tech and service contracts, and gain significant tax benefits. For many, the goal is to support religious schools which then profit from enrollment growth.

How did billionaires get the public to go along with their privatization goals?

They used their vast resources to set up think tanks and lobbying organizations which employ hyperbolic messaging with misleading data to communicate that public schools are failing, insisting parents need resources (vouchers) to find alternative schooling options. When their voucher goals met with resistance in the 1990s, billionaires focused on spreading charter schools instead, especially in major cities. The charter movement created the false narrative that parents should leave their local public school instead of focusing on increased funding to meet changing student needs.

During Trump’s first term, and after the pandemic hit, vouchers started to reappear, especially in red states, as billionaires backed pro-voucher candidates in state legislatures and Congress to secure favorable voucher legislation. However, not a single taxpayer-funded voucher program in the United States has been approved by voters. Every state voucher program was enacted by legislators, often under heavy pressure from well-funded pro-voucher lobbying groups. Billionaires also funded groups who lobbied Congress to pass the federal tax credit voucher scheme in July that enlists all 50 states to join in the billionaire’s version of “education freedom for private school choice.”

How will they use the “historic” federal tax credit to spread more vouchers?

Taxpayers in states that opt in to the federal voucher scheme select from a list of scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) to reduce their tax liability by $1700 when they pay their 2027 taxes. Billionaires have been funding K-12 SGOs for over 25 years. They use the money raised to give scholarships for students to attend private schools. These SGOs will have billions more from individual taxpayers to use for the same purposes. Billionaire John Walton, son of Sam Walton of Wal-Mart and the richest family in the US, co-founded the nation’s two largest scholarships granting organizations, ACE Scholarships and Children’s Scholarship Fund. Most of their scholarships go to students who leave public schools to attend religious schools.

The federal voucher program includes no spending cap, and the billionaires have already tossed in over $10 million to market the program. The voucher advocates are pushing hard for regulations that slam the door on any approach that does not further the growth of this largely unregulated voucher program.

The path forward: opt out, speak up, organize

This isn’t a grassroots uprising. It’s a long-running, well-funded project, one that keeps losing at the ballot box, so it shifts strategy: different messaging, different vehicles, same end goal. If we want truly “free” public education, we can’t let billionaires and private interests redefine freedom as a shopping spree financed by public dollars.

The path forward is clear, even if it’s not flashy. Communities can press state leaders not to opt in. Parents and educators can demand transparency from scholarship-granting organizations and insist on real accountability for any program that touches public money. And all of us can keep returning to the basic truth: the best “choice” is a fully funded, welcoming neighborhood public school, one that serves every child, not just the children a private system chooses to accept.

Public education is a public promise. We should protect it like one.

Categories Billionaires, Education Industry, Privatization, Scandals, School Choice, Vouchers

Ohio: “Center for Christian Virtue” Starts Schools, Draws on Public Funds

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2026 //
2

Stephen Dyer, former state legislator, follows the money. As usual, in Ohio, public money is flowing to private organizations that are neither accountable nor effective. In this post, he assays the trail of public funds collected by the Center for Christian Virtue. The Ohio Constitution could not be clearer: no money for religious schools. The Ohio legislature treats the state constitution like an outdated relic.

Dyer writes on his blog Tenth Period:

The Center for Christian Virtue is making quite a play in Ohio’s education policy landscape. They are using a multimillion dollar Capital Square office to run the lobbying effort to continue the state’s unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies. They also are running a so-called $3.2 million Scholarship Granting Organization, which is really just a fancy way of funneling millions more of our tax dollars into unaccountable private schools.

And, potentially most harmful of all, they’re running an operation they call “school planting” where they use the unconstitutional private school tuition subsidy to kick-start “schools” inside of churches across Ohio.

They are now claiming to have done this with 15 “schools” so far, publicly naming four new ones that opened this school year and another 4 next school year. Here’s how they brag about it in their news release about this initiative:

“Through our innovative school-in-a-church model, God is expanding access to Christian education for families in every corner of the state. By leveraging existing church facilities, we help keep costs low, making it possible for more families to afford a high-quality, Christ-centered education.”

Let’s set aside the fact that having schools pop up in churches is an ancient practice and not in any way “innovative” (having American taxpayers subsidize these things is “innovative”, though).

Anyway, here’s the thing: a total of 25 kids in only 1 of these schools — Westside Preparatory, which is the shining example displayed on CCV’s education website — has ever been tested for proficiency in reading and math, with only 9 ever being deemed “proficient” in both1.

This performance reflects these kids’ scores on tests the schools gets to pick from scores of options allowed by the state.

Public schools, in contrast, do not get to pick their kids’ tests.

All taxpayers had to do for 9 private school kids to test proficient on tests the school picked was to unconstitutionally subsidize these schools by about $2 million.2

[Open the link to see the scores.]

But at least the schools’ scores are 51 percentage points worse last year than the previous year in Math. Not an awesome trend, by the way.

Quite a return, wouldn’t you say? I mean, considering that none of these kids ever attended a public school. I am deducing this because in the schools’ first year of existence, only kindergarteners and first graders are included in their enrollment counts.

And that’s it. That’s all we know about the quality of these 15 “schools.” Hence my quotation marks around the word “school”.
Because what these “schools” really seem to be are money makers for CCV so it can finance the elimination of public education.

This is why I call them the new White Hat.
For those who aren’t familiar with White Hat, it was the company run by David Brennan that made millions running Charter Schools in Ohio and simply flipped a small percentage of those profits into Republican campaign war chests with the goal of de-funding public schools and the teachers unions that backed Democrats.

CCV is running the same White Hat playbook — set up a bunch of bullshit shell corporations, siphon millions of public dollars from Ohio’s 1.5 million public school students, use a small percentage of that money to lobby Ohio legislators and governors (who are notoriously cheap to buy) who allow CCV to continue stealing that money from kids, then watch public school kids suffer from it all.

All in the name of Jesus — they call this a ministry even!

Because robbing money from poor kids in Columbus, Athens, Steubenville and Findlay is exactly what Christ would have done.
What CCV is doing to Ohio’s public school kids is blasphemy. Pure and simple.

But get this: Because CCV’s operation involves advocating for the state to shovel money to private schools, we have no idea how much of that largesse CCV is accumulating. We do know that CCV staff is making bank — again, just as Jesus intended.

Please open the link and finish reading this post. Once again, the people of Ohio are being ripped off by grifters.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Ohio, Privatization, School Choice

Florida Legislature Planning a New Cash Subsidy for Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2026 //
1

Jason Garcia, an investigative reporter who writes, a blog called “Seeking Rents” uncovered a new Republican plan to shovel taxpayers’ money to charter schools. Under Ron DeSantis and a Republicanncontrolled legislature, Florida is determined to crush public schools by sending public money to charter schools and vouchers.

Here is a new twist: Republicans want school districts to share their funding with charter schools they did not authorize.

Garcia reports:

Five years ago, Republican leaders in Tallahassee gave the charter school industry something it had been seeking for years: A way around local voters.

The change — obscured inside larger education legislation that also included restrictions on the participation of transgender students in school sports — gave state colleges and universities the power to authorize new charter schools.

In other words, it enabled charter schools — public schools run by private management entities rather than public school districts — to bypass locally elected School Boards and work instead through the governor-appointed boards that control state colleges and universities.

The industry now wants to make local voters help pay for these state-imposed charters, too.

The idea is contained inside a package of tax cuts and tax-policy changes proposed last week by the Florida Senate. It would require school districts to split revenue from what’s sometimes called the “additional millage” — an optional property tax that county voters can levy via referendum in order to raise extra funding for their local schools — with every charter school in the area.

A school district currently only has to share proceeds from the additional millage with charters that the school district itself approved.

The immediate impact would be minor: There are currently only 12 charter schools across Florida that have been approved by an “alternate authorizer” like a college or a university.

But it could escalate quickly.

Just last month, for instance, the board of trustees at Miami Dade College signed off on six new charter schools — doubling, in one meeting, the number of charters in Florida approved without permission from the local school board.

They are the first of what could become a wave of new charters unleashed by the Miami college, which just launched a new authorization program late last year, according to WLRN Public Radio and Television.

WLRN reported in December that Dade College had begun pitching its authorization services to prospective charter operators. During one webinar, a college administrator told attendees that they could expect friendlier treatment from governor-appointed college boards than voter-elected school boards.

“I think one of the benefits of going to a college authorizer is that colleges are wanting to do this,” he said. “We’re going to be looking at the same types of things that the districts look at, but with the mindset that we really do want to make this a partnership, and we want to make it successful.”

It’s not the only potential accelerant that could lead to more charters sidestepping school boards.

Florida lawmakers last year approved a major expansion of the state’s “Schools of Hope” program, an incentive program through which charter school operators can get lucrative cash grants and low-interest loans if they open up new campuses in certain locations. The law was pushed through Tallahassee in part by lobbyists for Success Academy, the New York charter network that plans to open new schools in Miami.

The new law enables Schools of Hope charters to work through college and universities rather than solely through school districts.

Miami, Florida’s most populous county, certainly seems to be the focal point of this latest legislative proposal, too. 

Additional millage property taxes expire every four years unless extended by voters through. And Miami’s tax, which generates more than $400 million a year, is currently set to lapse on June 30, 2027 — which means the School Board may soon schedule another countywide referendum.

The provision requiring local school districts to share money with state-imposed charters would take effect just before that vote could happen. 

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, DeSantis, Education Industry, Florida, Funding

Peter Greene: West Virginia Reduces Accountability for Private Schools That Get Public $$$

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2026 //
3

The introduction of vouchers for private and religious schools is accompanied by certain lies.

  1. Vouchers won’t cost much
  2. Vouchers will save poor kids from failing public schools.
  3. Voucher schools will be more accountable than public schools.
  4. Vouchers won’t hurt public schools.

Every one of those claims is a lie. Vouchers always cost far more than was predicted. In every state, most vouchers are claimed by students who are already in enrolled nonpublic schools. Voucher schools typically are completely unaccountable for their use of public funds.

Peter Greene offers the example of West Virginia.

West Virginia passed a law to allow taxpayer-funded school vouchers in 2021, and they’ve been tweaking it ever since. They opened it up to more and more students. Consequently, the costs of the program are ballooning: when the law was passed, supporters declared it would cost just $23 million in its first year, and now the estimate for the coming school year is $245 to $315 million.

With that kind of money on the line, you’d think that the state might want to put some accountability and oversight rules in place. You know– so the taxpayers know what they’re getting for their millions of dollars.

But you would be backwards. Instead, the legislature is considering a bill to reduce accountability for private and religious schools.
SB 216, the Restoring Private Schools Act of 2026, is short and simple. It consists of the current accountability rules for private, parochial or church schools, or schools of a religious order– with a whole lot of rules crossed out.

What are some of the rules that the legislation proposes to eliminate for private and religious schools? Here’s the list of rules slated for erasure:

  • The requirement for a minimum number of hours of instruction.
  • The requirement to maintain attendance and disease immunization records for each enrolled student.
  • The requirement to provide, upon request of county superintendent, a list of the names and addresses of all students in the school between ages 7 and 16.
  • The requirement to annually administer a nationally normed standardized test in the same grades as required for public schools. Ditto the requirement to assess the progress of students with special needs.
  • Since there’s no test requirement, there is also no requirement to provide testing data to parents and the state department of education.
  • The requirement to establish curriculum objectives, “the attainment of which will enable students to develop the potential for becoming literate citizens.” Scrap also the requirement for an instructional program to meet that goal.
  • So under this bill, private schools would not have to have a plan for educating students, would not have to spend a minimum amount of time trying to educate students, and would not have to provide the state with any evidence that they are actually educating students.
  • The bill does add one bit of new language:
  • As autonomous entities free of governmental oversight of instruction, private, parochial, or church, schools may implement such measures for instruction and assessment of pupils as leadership of such schools may deem appropriate.

In other words, private religious schools accepting taxpayer-funded vouchers may do whatever the hell they want.

The bill is sponsored by Senator Craig Hart. Hart calls himself a school teacher, and is mentioned as an agriculture/FFA teacher, though I could find no evidence of where he teaches. He was elected in 2024 after running as a hardcore MAGA. He has pushed for requiring Bibles in school, among other MAGA causes.

Said Eric Kerns, superintendent of Faith Christian Academy, “It just gives private schools a lot more flexibility in what they would be able to do as far as assessment and attendance and school days. Our accountability is that if people aren’t satisfied with the education they’re receiving, then they go to another private school or back to the public school or they homeschool.” Also known as “No accountability at all.” A school is not a taco truck.

As reported by Amelia Ferrell Knisely at West Virginia Watch, at least one legislator tried to put some accountability back in the bill. GOP Sen. Charles Clements tried to put back a nationally-recognized testing requirement and share results with parents. Said Clements

I want to see private schools survive, but I think we have to have guardrails of some sort. There’s a lot of money around, and it’s a way for people to come in and not produce a product we need … I think it just leaves the door open for problems.

Exactly. And his amendment was rejected. The School Choice Committee chair said the school could still use a real test if they wanted to, but the bill would allow more flexibility to choose newer test options; I’m guessing someone is pulling for the Classical Learning Test, the conservative unwoke anti-SAT test.


Democrat Mike Woelfel tried to put the immunization record back; that was rejected, too.

Look, the Big Standardized Test is a terrible measure of educational quality, and it should be canceled for everyone. But for years the choice crowd promised that once choice was opened up, we’d get a market driven by hard data. Then it turned out that the “hard data” showed that voucher systems were far worse than public schools, and the solution has not been to make the voucher system work better, but to silence any data that reveals a voucher system failure.

The goal is not higher quality education. The goal is public tax dollars for private religious schools– but only if the private religious schools can remain free of regulation, oversight, or any restrictions that get in the way of their power to discriminate freely against whoever they wish to discriminate against.

This is not about choice. It’s about taxpayer subsidies for private religious schools, and it’s about making sure those schools aren’t accountable to anyone for how they use that money. It’s another iteration of the same argument we’ve heard across the culture–that the First Amendment should apply because I am not free to fully exercise my religion unless I can unreservedly discriminate against anyone I choose and unless I get taxpayer funding to do it.

We’ve been told repeatedly that the school choice bargain is a trade off– the schools get autonomy in exchange for accountability, but that surely isn’t what’s being proposed here. If West Virginia is going to throw a mountain of taxpayer money at private schools, those schools should be held accountable. This bill promises the opposite; may it die a well-deserved death.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Funding, Hoax, Privatization, Vouchers, West Virginia

46 States Have Charter Schools But NOT South Dakota!

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2026 //
2

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.

The South Dakota legislature just defeated charters in a tie vote, and the Republican Governor refused to break the tie.

No charter schools in South Dakota!

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, South Dakota, Supporting public schools

A Review of My Book in the Wellesley Magazine

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2026 //
11

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.

  1. WINTER 2026

About-Face

Books and media by the Wellesley community

Image credit: Agata Nowicka

AUTHOR Catherine O’Neill Grace

PUBLISHED ON February 24, 2026

ISSUE WINTER 2026

“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

Diane Silvers Ravitch ’60
An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else
Columbia University Press, 248 pages, $24.95

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, Ethics, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Personal, Privatization, Standardized Testing
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