Archives for category: Freedom to Learn
« Older Entries

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

Our Pressure Cooker Schools Are Destroying Children and Childhood

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2025 //
26

The New York Times Sunday Magazine published an article titled “America’s Children Are Unwell. Are Schools Part of the Problem?” It was written by staff member Jia Lynn Yang.

I anticipated that the article would be another lament about test scores, of which there have been many recently. But it wasn’t!

Instead, Yang described the explosion of mental health issues among the nation’s children. And she attributed it largely to the unending pressure to compete for ever higher test scores. EXACTLY!

Yang knows that the changes in school are not the only cause of declining mental health. There are many more culprits, including social media and the pressures of contemporary life. And there is also the possibility that children are being misdiagnosed and overdiagnosed. I can’t help but recall a story from 1994 about an elite private school that received a private $2 million grant to screen children for learning disabilities. Overrun by experts, the program “got out of hand.” Nearly half the children were diagnosed with disabilities, and the program was cancelled.

We live in a stressful world. Children are pressured to succeed, to comply, to compete, to win the approval of their peers, to dress the “right” way, to be and do things by which they will be judged by their peers, by their parents, by the world they inhabit. Some children succeed, many don’t.

Schools these days are doing things to children that add to their stress. They have been doing harmful things to children by federal mandate since 2002.

Besieged by expectations, demands, and pressures, many children are breaking. It’s our fault.

She writes:

One of the more bewildering aspects of the already high-stress endeavor of 21st-century American parenting is that at some point your child is likely to be identified with a psychiatric diagnosis of one kind or another. Many exist in a gray zone that previous generations of parents never encountered.

A diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is practically a rite of passage in American boyhood, with nearly one in four 17-year-old boys bearing the diagnosis. The numbers have only gone up, and vertiginously: One million more children were diagnosed with A.D.H.D. in 2022 than in 2016.

The numbers on autism are so shocking that they are worth repeating. In the early 1980s, one in 2,500 children had an autism diagnosis. That figure is now one in 31.

Nearly 32 percent of adolescents have been diagnosed at some point with anxiety; the median age of “onset” is 6 years old. More than one in 10 adolescents have experienced a major depressive disorder, according to some estimates. New categories materialize. There is now oppositional defiant disorder, in addition to pathological demand avoidance…

The experience of school has changed rapidly in recent generations. Starting in the 1980s, a metrics-obsessed regime took over American education and profoundly altered the expectations placed on children, up and down the class ladder. In fact, it has altered the experience of childhood itself.

This era of policymaking has largely ebbed, with disappointing results. Math and reading levels are at their lowest in decades. The rules put in place by both political parties were well-meaning, but in trying to make more children successful, they also circumscribed more tightly who could be served by school at all.

“What’s happening is, instead of saying, ‘We need to fix the schools,’ the message is, ‘We need to fix the kids,’” said Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College and the author of “Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life….”

Other books have echoed this critique. I think offhand of the book by Pasi Sahlberg and William Doyle: Let the Children Play: How More Play Will Save Our Schools and Help Children Thrive. This is how they summarize their argument:

“Play is how children explore, discover, fail, succeed, socialize, and flourish. It is a fundamental element of the human condition. It’s the key to giving schoolchildren skills they need to succeed–skills like creativity, innovation, teamwork, focus, resilience, expressiveness, empathy, concentration, and executive function. Expert organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Centers for Disease Control agree that play and physical activity are critical foundations of childhood, academics, and future skills–yet politicians are destroying play in childhood education and replacing it with standardization, stress, and forcible physical restraint, which are damaging to learning and corrosive to society.”

There is an organization–Defending the Early Years–that fights for the rights of childhood, that tries to keep academic pressures out of the classrooms of very young children.

But who defends the children in grades 1-12? There are groups of parents in almost every state who oppose the pressures of high-stakes testing, oppose the efforts by tech companies to replace actual experiences with machines and technologies, oppose the interference of politicians to standardize teaching.

One group fights off the tech companies that use personal student data to market their products: The Parent Coalition for Studebt Privacy.

Corporate America now looks to the schools as a source of profit. The schools and students need to be protected from rapacious capitalism, which wants to privatize schools for profit and sell products that monetize instruction.

Yang describes the transformation of the school from the 1980s to the present:

School was not always so central to American childhood. In 1950, less than half of all children attended kindergarten. Only about 50 percent graduated from high school, and without much professional penalty. A person spent fewer years of their life in school, and fewer hours in the day furiously trying to learn. However bored a child might become sitting behind a desk, freedom awaited after the final bell rang, with hours after school to play without the direction of adults.

But as the country’s economy shifted from factories and farms to offices, being a student became a more serious matter. The outcome of your life could depend on it.

During an era of global competition, the country’s leaders also began to see school as a potential venue for national glory, or shame. In 1983, a commission created by Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, Terrel H. Bell, released a dire report on the state of American schools called “A Nation at Risk.” It warned that “if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

Over the next decade, Democratic and Republican governors such as Bill Clinton in Arkansas and Lamar Alexander in Tennessee began molding their states’ schools with new standards of testing and accountability. Schools were treated more like publicly traded companies, with test scores as proxies for profits. Before long, schools had public ratings, so ubiquitous they now appear on real estate listings.

The pressure kept rising. By 2001, 30 states had laws that imposed a system of punishments and rewards for schools based on their test scores. The next year, President George W. Bush’s signature education reform law, No Child Left Behind, made the effort national.

With school funding now on the line, there were unmistakable incentives for children to be diagnosed. Starting in the 1990s, students with autism or A.D.H.D. become newly eligible for added support in the classroom. Getting a child treated, potentially with medication, could help an entire classroom achieve higher scores, especially if the child’s behavior was disruptive to others. And in some parts of the country, children with disabilities were not counted toward a school’s overall marks, a carve-out that could boost scores.

The added metrics may well have compelled more children to receive the support they needed. Either way, educational policymaking yielded a change in diagnoses. In states that added new accountability standards, researchers found a clear rise in A.D.H.D. According to one analysis, the rate of A.D.H.D. diagnoses among children ages 8 to 13 in low-income homes went from 10 percent to 15 percent after the arrival of No Child Left Behind.

The impact of the law on autism diagnoses has been less documented. But there is a great deal of overlap among these disorders. Anywhere from 30 to 80 percent of children diagnosed with autism also have A.D.H.D. Experts have also pointed out that the rise in autism has largely taken place on the more subtle end of the spectrum, where psychiatrists expanded the diagnosis. Students with this profile often need educators who can be eminently flexible in their approach, a tough task when an entire classroom has to focus on narrowly mastering certain testable skills.

The demands on performance in higher grades trickled down into younger and younger ages. In 2009, the Obama administration offered greater funding to schools that adopted new national learning standards called the Common Core. These included an emphasis on reading by the end of kindergarten, even though many early childhood experts believe that not all children are developmentally ready to read at that age.

With each new wave of reforms, the tenor of kindergarten changed. Rote lessons in math and reading crept into classrooms, even though experts say young children learn best through play. Researchers discovered that in the span of about a decade, kindergarten had suddenly become more like first grade.

Preschool was not far behind, as even toddlers were expected to stay still for longer stretches of time to imbibe academic lessons. This again defied the consensus among early childhood experts. Children, parents and teachers struggle through this mismatch daily. In 2005, a study showed that preschoolers were frequently being expelled for misbehavior, and at rates more than three times that of school-age children.

“We’re not aligning the developmental needs of kids with the policies and practices that go on daily with schools,” said Denise Pope, senior lecturer at Stanford University and co-founder of Challenge Success, a nonprofit group that works with schools to improve student well-being.

The pressure to learn more led to a restructuring of the school day itself. Before the 1980s, American children usually had recess breaks throughout the day. By 2016, only eight states required daily recess in elementary schools. And when researchers studied what had become of lunchtime, they learned that children often had just 20 minutes to not only eat but stop to use the bathroom after class, walk to the cafeteria and wait in line for food.

I think about my own time in the public elementary public schools in Houston. We had recess every day. I don’t think it was a matter of state law. Educators then knew that children needed time to play. It was common sense. Today, parent groups organize to persuade legislatures to mandate recess. If they don’t, parents fear, every minute will be spent preparing for tests and taking tests.

They are right. The so-called “reforms” of the past quarter century–No Child Left Behind, high-stakes testing, competition, Race to the Top, punishing or rewarding teachers for their students’ test scores, closing schools and firing staff because of low test scores, the Common Core standards–have made test scores and standardization the heart of schooling.

In a continuing campaign to raise test scores, there are winners and losers. Typically, the winners are children from affluent families, and the losers are the children of not-affluent families. The winners are celebrated, the losers are stigmatized. The social class divide among children is hardened by these practices.

Worse, the pressure on students has caused an increase in anxiety, depression, and boredom. In response, parents seek diagnoses of autism or some other learning disorder so that their children will get more time or attention.

Some parents blame the public schools for the pressure and competition imposed on them by elected officials. They seek alternatives to the public schools, which are obsessed with standardization, testing, and accountability.

Yang points out:

This discontent helps empower the conservative effort to defund the public school system and let parents pick their own schools, with taxpayers covering the tuition. Each child who no longer seems to fit into the country’s education system — and more often than not they are boys — potentially expands the constituency for these ideas. And trust erodes further in the progressive project of a democracy built on giving everyone a free and equal education.

The Democratic Party is unable or unwilling to see the problems they helped create. The Republican Party is quite happy to see the public search for alternatives like charter schools and vouchers, and it has enabled the movement to have taxpayers foot the bill for private and religious schools.

By turning childhood into a thing that can be measured, adults have managed to impose their greatest fears of failure onto the youngest among us. Each child who strays from our standards becomes a potential medical mystery to be solved, with more tests to take, more metrics to assess. The only thing that seems to consistently evade the detectives is the world around that child — the one made by the grown-ups.

Who made that world? Both political parties. Governors. Legislatures. Think tanks. The wealthiest, who believe their financial success proves their superiority. Editorial boards.

Here is the most significant lesson that our elected officials refuse to learn. Their elaborate schemes for testing and measuring children have hurt children and undermined the joy of learning. They have raised the anxiety level of children while corrupting education itself.

Education is not what gets measured on standardized tests. Education is exploration, investigation, insight, observation, wanting to know more, learning to love learning.

Our politicians, prodded by so-called “reformers,” have managed to pollute education while demoralizing teachers and destroying public commitment to public schools.

Our public schools need to be freed from the failed ideas that hurt children. We need a rebirth of sturdy ideas that

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Education Industry, Education Reform, Extremism, Failure, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Health, Joy, Standardized Testing, Students

Trump Moves to Shut Down US Department of Education

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2025 //
11

Trump said he would close the Department of Education, and he’s well on the way to closing a Congressionally-authorized Department without asking Congress for permission.

He and wrestling entrepreneur Linda McMahon have decided that the Department is responsible for stagnant test scores. Nothing could be stupider but what would one expect from people who look with contempt on education. Especially public schools.

I cannot explain their thinking but know this: Trump wants to destroy research into science and medicine. He wants to control the curriculum and to ban teaching about race, ethnicity and gender.

As Forrest Gump’s mother taught him: “Stupid is as stupid does.”

Michael C. Bender of The New York Times wrote:

The Trump administration announced on Tuesday an aggressive plan to continue dismantling the Education Department, ending the agency’s role in supporting academics at elementary and high schools and in expanding access to college.

Those responsibilities will instead be largely taken over by the Labor Department.

Additional changes include moving a child care grant program for college students and foreign medical school accreditation to the Health and Human Services Department, and transferring Fulbright programs and international education grants to the State Department. The Interior Department will take over the Indian Education Office.

Shifting duties away from the Education Department aligns with President Trump’s goal of eventually closing the agency, a move opposed by teachers’ unions and student rights groups and one that can only be accomplished with an act of Congress.

Less clear was how moving programs to other agencies aligned with Mr. Trump’s reason for closing the Education Department, which he has said was to give states more power in shaping school policies. A senior official at the Education Department said the changes would streamline bureaucracy so that “at the end of the day, it means more dollars to the classroom.”

“Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement, adding that the changes were an attempt to “refocus education on students, families and schools.”

The plan drew some immediate blowback from Republicans, including Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, who said in a statement that the “department’s core offices are not discretionary functions.”

“They are foundational,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said. “They safeguard civil rights, expand opportunity, and ensure that every child, in every community, has the chance to learn, grow and succeed on equal footing.”

Kevin Carey, the vice president for education and work at New America, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, said the changes were “wasteful, wrong and illegal.”

“Secretary McMahon is creating a bureaucratic Rube Goldberg machine that will waste millions of taxpayer dollars by outsourcing vital programs to other agencies,” Mr. Carey said. “It’s like paying a contractor double to mow your lawn and then claiming you’ve cut the home maintenance budget. It makes no sense.”

Administration officials have pointed to the recent federal shutdown to justify the moves, noting that schools remained open and students continued to be taught despite nearly all of the Education Department’s staff having been furloughed.

The department has posted several social media memes making such a point. In an X post last week, the department announced that federal workers were returning to the office, adding, “But let’s be honest: did you really miss us at all?”

Liz Huston, a White House spokeswoman, said the administration was committed to shrinking the agency “while still ensuring efficient delivery of funds and essential programs.”

“The Democrat shutdown made one thing unmistakably clear: Students and teachers don’t need Washington bureaucrats micromanaging their classrooms,” Ms. Huston said.

Republicans in charge of the House and Senate in Washington have signaled little enthusiasm for voting on a bill to close the department, which was created by an act of Congress in 1979.

Mr. Trump has also shown little interest in collaborating with Congress in his bid to reshape the federal government, and his administration has continued to seek ways to diminish the Education Department.

“We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible,” Mr. Trump said in March after signing an executive orderthat directed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to start razing the department.

Ms. McMahon’s first act after joining Mr. Trump’s cabinet this year was to instruct the department’s staff to prepare for its “final mission” of shuttering the agency. The following week, Ms. McMahon fired 1,315 of those workers.

The layoffs decimated the department’s Office for Civil Rights, which was created to enforce Congress’s promise of equal educational opportunity for all students, and eliminated the agency’s research armdedicated to tracking U.S. student achievement, which for many students is at three-decade lows.

In July, after the Supreme Court cleared the way for mass layoffs at the department, the administration moved adult education, family literacy programs and career and technical education to the Labor Department.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Health, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

My Memoirs Are Now in Print!

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2025 //
34

Today is the official publication date of my memoirs. This evening, October 21, I will be in dialogue with Leonie Haimson at the Brooklyn Heights branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, at 286 Cadman Plaza.

I wrote stuff about my personal life that I have never shared with anyone. It seemed to be the right time; easier to write about than to say, even to my closest friends and relatives.

The Network for Public Education posted this information:

Diane’s new book, charter scandals, and more…

Diane Ravitch’s memoir is a moving chronicle of intellectual courage and deep care for public education. Once a leading conservative voice advocating testing, standards, charters, and vouchers, she had the humility to acknowledge when her beliefs failed in practice, recognizing that poverty—not “bad teachers” or “failing schools”—was the real crisis. With honesty and grace, Diane retraces her journey from her Houston childhood to her service in the government, including a stint in the conservative Department of Education, and her eventual transformation into one of our fiercest defenders of public schools. Blending personal reflection with a historian’s rigor, Diane explains how she came to embrace equity, professional teachers, and democratic public education, becoming an inspiring activist whose life’s work continues to uplift the promise of our public schools.

You can purchase An Education at your local independent bookstore, on Amazon, or directly from Columbia University Press. 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Personal, Privatization

Tell Linda McMahon What You Think of “Patriotic Education”

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2025 //
20

Trump and Secretary Linda McMahon want to do something that is not only wrong but illegal. They want to mess with the history and social studies that are taught in the nation’s schools. They want schools to teach students only what is great about the U.S., while overlooking the shameful events of the past, like slavery, segregation, the forced removal of Native Americans from their homelands, discrimination against people because of their race, national origin, religion.

Federal law explicitly prohibits any attempt to influence the curriculum of public schools by any federal officer.

If you think it’s a terrible idea to whitewash history, take note of this chance to send a message:

Federal Dept of Education: Please Submit a Comment – Especially Social Studies Teachers – it is worth it.  Federal Dept of Education is  holding its public comment period for Sec. McMahon’s new supplemental priority, “Promoting Patriotic Education,” until this Friday. at 11:59pm Share your thoughts on why a “patriotic” education, especially as defined by the Trump administration, is harmful! As the National Coalition on School Diversity points out, this grant prioritization mobilizes deeply racist and harmful executive orders such as January’s Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling and March’s Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History

 Here is where to submit the comment – look at the comment checklist

https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/ED-2025-OS-0745-0001

 

Categories Curriculum, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Learn, History, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Azar Nafisi Will Speak at Wellesley College on October 29! You Are Invited to Attend!

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2025 //
0

The celebrated author Azar Nafisi will speak at Wellesley College on October 29 at 4 p.m. as part of the annual Diane Silvers Ravitch 1960 lecture series. She will speak in Alumnae Hall. Dr. Nafisi will answer questions after the lecture.

Her topic: READ DANGEROUSLY: THE SUBVERSIVE POWER OF LITERATURE IN TROUBLED TIMES.

Drawing from her life between Iran and the U.S., Nafisi will explore how literature defies repression—whether under the Islamic Republic or the rise of Trump. In times of crackdown on women, culture, minorities, and rights, literature opens spaces of freedom where authoritarianism seeks to closethem. Today, imaginative knowledge is more vital than everin the fight for democracy.

The lecture will be live-streamed.

Azar Nafisi wrote one of the best books I have ever read: Reading Lolita in Tehran.

The book was a sensation. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years.

Dr. Nafisi was born in Tehran. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma. She returned to Iran in 1979, after the Iranian Revolution, and taught English literature at the University of Tehran. In 1981, she was expelled from the university for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil.

She returned to the U.S. in 1997 and acquired American citizenship in 2008.

She has written many books about literature and how it can change our lives.

The public is welcome and admission is free.

I hope to see you there!

Categories Courage, Creativity, Democracy, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Gender, International

John Thompson Reviews Hanna Rosin’s Report on the Education Mess in Oklahoma: Part 1

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2025 //
1

John Thompson, retired teacher and historian in Oklahoma, listened to a two-part podcast about Oklahoma education by Hanna Rosin of The Atlantic. He reports on what he heard, based on his in-depth knowledge of politics and education in his state.

John Thompson writes:

Introducing her first podcast on Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters, the Atlantic’s Hannah Rosin notes the long history of public schools being attacked for cultural and political reasons. Then, she recalls:

What’s been happening to American public schools lately is different: more coordinated, more creative, and blanketing the nation. Pressure on what kids learn and read is coming from national parents’ movements, the White House, the Supreme Court.

Rosin further explains that Ryan Walters “has pushed the line further than most.”

Walters recently announced an ideology test for new teachers moving to Oklahoma from “places like California and New York.” And, although the Oklahoma Supreme Court has issued a temporary stay on Walters’ standards, he’s “tried to overhaul the curriculum, adding dozens of references to Christianity and the Bible and making students ‘identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results.’”

The first of two podcasts review how Walters has “already succeeded in helping create a new template for what public schools can be.” Part two will go even deeper into how “Walters and a larger conservative movement seem to be trying to redefine public schools as only for an approved type.” As he said, “If you’re going to come into our state … don’t come in with these blue-state values.”

Rosin starts with Walters’ “Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism,” and his claim, “For too long in this country, we’ve seen the radical left attack individuals’ religious liberty in our schools. We will not tolerate that in Oklahoma.” He said this in a video sent to school administrators who were supposed to play it for every student and every parent.

This mandate, however, is the opposite of his approach when he was an award-winning “woke” middle school teacher. Rosin interviewed two of Walters students, Shane and Starla, about his “parodies,” that were called, “little roasts.”

Shane, a male conservative, compared Walters’ “little roasts,” such as “Teardrops on My Scantron,” to those of Jimmy Kimmel.  

Starla, a lesbian. said of her teacher, “He was woke! (Laughs.) He was a woke teacher.” And she praised his teaching about the civil rights movement.

Rosin reported that today’s Ryan Walters is “unrecognizable” in comparison to the teacher they knew.  And, “Shane compared it to how you’d feel about your dad if he remarried a woman you didn’t like.”

In 2022 , when running for State Superintendent, pornography was Walters’ issue. He strongly supported HB 1775, which was a de facto ban on Critical Race Theory. It forbid teaching things like, “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

Walters’ top target was a high school teacher, Summer Boismier,  who, in response, covered her bookshelves with butcher paper. But she also posted a QR code for a Brooklyn library, which had books that Walters said were pornography.  Boismier resigned, but Walters successfully asked the Oklahoma State Board of Education to revoke her teaching certificate. He said, “There is no place for a teacher with a liberal political agenda in the classroom. Ms. Boismier’s providing access to banned and pornographic material to students is unacceptable and we must ensure she doesn’t go to another district and do the same thing.”

After being labeled a pedophile, Boismier started to get serious threats. Then the Libs of TikTok started a campaign against alleged gay teachers who were supposedly “groomers,” prompting bomb threats.

Then, as Rosin explained, “state Democrats called for an impeachment probe, and Walters leaned in harder.” For instance, Walters ramped up his campaign against teachers unions who he called a “terrorist organization.”

Walters also claimed that a “civil war” was being fought in our schools.

Rosin reported on how Walters gained a lot of attention “when he said teachers could cover the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, where white Tulsans slaughtered hundreds of Black people, but they should not, quote, ‘say that the skin color determined it.””

Then, “Walters accused the media of twisting his words. He said that “kids should never be made to feel bad or told they are inferior based on the color of their skin.”

In 2024, Rosin recalled,  Walters “directed all Oklahoma public schools to teach the Bible. And in an appearance on Fox News, Walters talked about displaying the Ten Commandments.” He claimed, “What we’ve seen in America are the Democrats, the teachers’ unions have driven God out of schools, and Americans, Oklahomans, President Trump want God back in the classroom.”

Trump responded on Truth Social, “Great job by Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters on FoxNews [sic] last night. Strong, decisive, and knows his ‘stuff.’” And, “I LOVE OKLAHOMA!”

There was pushback when it was learned that “one of the few Bibles that met Walters’ criteria is the “God Bless the USA Bible.” It was “endorsed by Lee Greenwood and President Trump. It sells for $59.99.”

As the first part of the podcast came to an end, it reviewed Walters’ recent setbacks.

The U.S. Supreme Court  stopped Oklahoma’s plan for  the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school. The Oklahoma Supreme Court has paused the Bible plan. And the special test by Prager U. for teachers from California, New York, and other “woke” states, faces legal challenges.

And Walters was lambasted after sexually explicit images of naked women were seen on a screen inside his office.

Part two will give Walters a chance to tell his side of the story. Rosin previews his response by quoting him: “Yeah, they’re outrageous liars.”

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Education Industry, Education Reform, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Oklahoma

The Trump Cabal’s “Compact” to Stamp Out Academic Freedom

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2025 //
1

Our reader Christine Langhoff discovered an excellent analysis of the “compact” that the Trump administration has offered to several universities. A “compact” usually refers to an equitable agreement between two parties. The Trump “compact” is a harsh threat: sign or die.

Christine writes:

Here’s UCLA Law professor Joseph Fishkin on the so-called compact the administration want universities to accept.

Any lawyer—really, any careful reader—who makes it through even the first paragraph of the document can see that this is incorrect. The “compact” is quite explicit: Universities that do not sign on to this thing thereby “elect[] to forego federal benefits.” What benefits? Well, that same first paragraph lists quite a few specific “benefits”: “(i) access to student loans, grant programs, and federal contracts; (ii) funding for research directly or indirectly; (iii) approval of student and other visas in connection with university matriculation and instruction; and (iv) preferential treatment under the tax code,” which means 501(c)(3) status. This compact is a “reward” in exactly the same sense that it is “rewarding” to purchase protection from the Mafia. The compact is an open, explicit threat.

It nonetheless does represent a tactical shift on the part of the Trump Administration. The Trump team’s goal has not changed. They want an unprecedented—and flagrantly unconstitutional—degree of government oversight and control over American universities. So far they are having some trouble obtaining it. Their initial strategy, to roll up the sector from the top, starting with Harvard, through bespoke negotiated dealmaking with individual schools, has turned out to be slower going—and I suspect, simply more labor-intensive—than I am guessing they expected. (I use the rollup metaphor to evoke how a monopolist takes over a sector by buying out one firm after another, gaining more leverage over holdouts as they go. So far it has not worked.) Meanwhile, federal district courts have dealt a series of significant blows to the government’s ability to, for example, arbitrarily withdraw federal scientific research grants. So the administration is pivoting to a new tactic, which seems to be to roll up the higher ed sector from what you might call the upper middle. Instead of starting at the very top with the high-stakes confrontation with Harvard and working their way down, the new tactical approach is to start with whichever prestigious schools seem likeliest—for various reasons—to be amenable to the government’s overtures. It is no accident that many of the schools May Mailman’s team first approached about this “compact” have interim presidents, who are inherently weak, sometimes because a prior president was successfully forced out through political agitation by the right.

https://balkin.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-art-of-replacing-law-with-deal.html

Categories Academic Freedom, Censorship, Democracy, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Higher Education, Trump

Trump is Our King George: What Would the Founders Say?

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2025 //
8

A reader who uses the name Quickwrit parses the Constitutionnand finds that Trump is doing today exactly what King George did to the colonists.

Quickwrit writes:

WHAT TRUMP IS DOING TODAY is the very same thing that our Declaration of Independence lists as the violations of liberty that triggered our Declaration of Independence. Take a look:

The King used armed forces to control American cities and towns, without first asking permission from the legislatures; quoting the Declaration, it says: “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.” Just like King Trump sending armed National Guard units into our cities today.

The King replaced local police with his armed forces. The Declaration says: “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

The King’s armed forces were protected from killing civilians: “For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.” People die today in ICE custody, and nothing happens.

The King ignores civil courts: “He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.”

“He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices.”

“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people.”

“He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained.” Today, not only do governors of Red States do nothing without Trump’s approval, neither does Congress.

The Declaration also says that we also declare our independence from the King for his:

“cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world’ (just like Trump’s tariffs);

“depriving us in many cases of the benefit of Trial by Jury” and “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences” (just like Trump deporting people without trial to be imprisoned in foreign nations).

The Declaration says Americans are breaking away because the King has opposed immigration that is vital to America’s economic growth, by “obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither.” Already in 1740, laws had been passed to grant “natural born” citizenship status to immigrants who lived there for seven consecutive years.

The King has also been “redistricting” Americans out of their right to representation: “He has refused to pass Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.” Just like the redistricting going on today.

Americans today truly need to read the history of our Revolution and what went into and is actually in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. Read the ACTUAL WRITINGS of our Founding Fathers, not just listen to or read the “analyses” of political talking heads on today’s TV and social media.

That kind of reading takes time, and too few Americans today are willing to spend the time.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Citizenship, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Gender, History, Trump

Texas Superintendent Goes Viral in Defense of Teachers, Books, and Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2025 //
10

John Kuhn is the superintendent of schools in Abilene, Texas. He was hired by the Abilene school board in April 2024. He previously served as superintendent in three small districts in Texas. The Abilene board introduced him this way

Dr. John Kuhn brings 27 years of proven experience in public education to Abilene ISD. Prior to joining the Abilene ISD team, Dr. Kuhn most recently served as Superintendent of Schools for Mineral Wells ISD. He has also served as superintendent of Perrin-Whitt CISD and as a high school principal, assistant principal, teacher, and bus driver in the Mineral Wells and Graford Independent School Districts.

I met John Kuhn at a conference of the Network for Public Education about a dozen years ago. At that time, he was superintendent of the Perrin-Whitt Distrist, which has about 320 students, half of whom are economically disadvantaged.

John is one of the most eloquent champions of public education that I’ve ever met. I remember him saying, “Send me the kids you don’t want. Send me the kids who don’t speak English. Send me the kids who are struggling to learn. Send me the kids with disabilities. I’m in a public school and we will teach them all.” Or words to that effect. I’m hoping he will be a keynote speaker at our next conference in Houston in April 2026. He’s the leader we need!

He posted this letter on his Facebook page and it drew a massive response and national attention.

Gosh where to begin? I’m eligible to retire in January, and I don’t want to because I feel like I owe the good people who hired me and this great community at least a few years of blood sweat and tears. I work for a great school board in a city I’ve absolutely fallen in love with. But holy moly do I want to pack it in right now. The burden is heavy.

Yesterday I spent hours at an update listening to the impacts on teachers and admins at public schools of bill after bill passed by our lege. Did you know that one bill says teachers are going to be required to catalogue every book in their classrooms? Kindergarten teachers have hundreds of tiny books. With what time? When?

Did you know that another bill says nurses can’t provide any health care whatsoever and counselors can’t provide any emotional support whatsoever without a written permission slip from parents? The bill language is so poorly written that—despite what it clearly says in black and white English—the bill author sent out a clarification saying nurses can provide a band-aid to a kid who is bleeding. He wouldn’t have to send out a clarification if they wouldn’t pass dumb bills—but legislators have been convinced by political groups who hate public schools that everyone inside them are wicked, evil people.

Did you know about the other new bill that says school administrators who work on the side as refs or one-act-play judges at any school anywhere are subject to a $10k fine per offense for working those jobs if they each individually don’t present a contract to their school board.

That doesn’t apply to me, but I know tons of APs and principals who ref and judge student drama contests. In fact, there’s a huge shortage of both, so if they didn’t do it, we’d be in an even bigger bind in trying to put on games. Again, the bill author had to put out a “clarification” claiming the bill doesn’t mean what it clearly says.

Because they refused to listen to the input of our educator groups—groups, by the way, that they are trying to get defunded because they consider them “taxpayer funded lobbyists” for representing school districts and municipalities.

There is a political movement to pull the teeth of local officials at schools and on city councils and county commissioners courts so that all we have is centralized state leadership. So local yokels like yours truly have to be continually demonized and legislated into submission.

I haven’t even talked about vouchers draining our public schools of resources so those education dollars can go toward private schools that aren’t subject to the crushing bureaucracy. I haven’t event talked about the new testing bill—the one that replaces STAAR with the 3x per year Death STAAR that, like its predecessor tests is solely owned and controlled by the TEA commissioner and is not norm-referenced so Texas student results can be compared to other states, which would keep things honest and prevent the manipulation of student results for political narrative-building.

Anyway, I go to a conference all day listening to this stuff the day after Republican Charlie Kirk is murdered and months after a Democratic state senator is murdered, and I just keep thinking, is it worth it? I can retire and keep to myself until I die of old age. I can just fish every single day. I can travel. I can camp. I can sleep in.

And I get to my hotel room and find some social media commenter calling my teachers “demons” because they assigned an chapter of the amazing book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as a reading passage for a freshman honors English class. This is a book written in the voice of a nine-year-old boy who lost his dad on 9/11 in the terrorist attack on the twin towers. It’s an award winning book. But the passage has the word “shit” in it. And it has a vulgar term that I’m told the teacher was unfamiliar with it. And it has a crude joke about talking butts, which I was a nine-year-old boy and that’s the kind of crudeness we giggle at, so the author was pretty spot on. It also has the word “pussy” but that was what the kid called his cat, but the Facebook post highlighted it as part of making a case that this book was inappropriate.

Thing is, it’s likely valid that this book should be restricted to older kids—17 and 18 year olds. It’s worth noting that this was assigned to only the honors kids because the other passage that the class was reading—also related to 9/11–was at too easy a reading level. So these poor teachers are trying to find something for advanced kids to read, and they don’t have time, and they’re making a good faith effort to push kids to Meets and Masters because they care (and if our A-F grade is too low, there is outrage over that too). And they pick this award-winning book. They decide one “shit” is tolerable. They aren’t offended by the word “pussy” because it literally isn’t a bad word in the context. They get it approved by a colleague.

And they are called “DEMONS.” (Ironically, in the comments of the outrage post, they’re also called “assholes,” which is literally worse than “anus,” which is one of the words the parent highlighted and took offense to, but nobody scolded the commenter for that vulgarity. What’s good for the goose… Commenters also typed “wtf” and “WTH,” which mean “what the fuck” and “what the hell” but nobody accused them of “grooming” children. Selective outrage, anyone.

Who needs this? Is everybody serious? Does everyone just feel absolutely compelled to post their moral superiority online by attacking perceived enemies they’ve never met or shared a meal with.

Our country is no longer capable of living in community. We’ve been driven to our corners. It is barely possible to be a public servant anymore. I totally get why our city manager retired.

My teachers aren’t demons. They may have made a mistake in assigning this book to 15-year-olds rather than 17-year-olds, and for that there are people online saying they need to be fired. Today Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close is likely temporarily coming off our library shelves while we review our book challenge policies. Read the book. It’ll make you cry.

We can’t win in public ed anymore. This is absolutely ridiculous. If I make it to December, it’s gonna be a miracle. I don’t need your sympathy replies, either. I’ll hang it up when I have to for my family and my health, and I’ll stick it out if I feel like I want to. In the meantime, I just want you to know I’m sick of politicians playing divisive politics and leaving local public servants to clean up the mess. Public schools are apolitical entities with the job of teaching kids to think critically and become awesome humans. We aren’t perfect. We have missteps, because we are human organizations. But don’t call my teachers DEMONS while you cuss in the comments.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Censorship, Courage, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Resistance, Supporting public schools, Teachers, Texas
« Older Entries