Everything Old Is New Again

Diane Ravitch is a name known to some, to few, and to many.

It depends upon what circles one travels in to determine who knows whom.

If it’s educational circles, then one is certainly well aware of her stature and renown. One wouldn’t suppose that bricklayers, stonemasons, heavy equipment operators, or welders would recognize her name. But, they could. One never knows.

However, Ms. Ravitch is a well-respected, and highly-regarded education historian, policy analyst, and author, who also blogs on her personal website DianeRavitch.net, and for many years, has advocated for improvements in Public Education.

She was appointed by POTUSes Clinton and George W. Bush to public service, served as Assistant Secretary of Education from 1991-93 to Secretary of Education, Lamar Alexander. From there, she was appointed membership to the National Assessment Governing Board, which supervises the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and served in that capacity from 1997-2004. She earned her PhD from Columbia University, and undergraduate from Wellesley College.

And ardent education reformer who opposes Common Core and the seemingly incessant testing to which students are subjected, she has said that the only sure way to stop corporations’ efforts to undermine taxpayer-funded Public Education is to “build a political movement so united and clear in its purpose, that it would be heard in every state Capitol, and even in Washington, D.C.”

Caricature of James Russell Lowell, by Théobald Chartran published in Vanity Fair, 21 August 1880.

Whereas formerly, she supported the school voucher system, she now opposes it, and in her 2010 book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” which NPR described as a “terrific and timely book,” she explains why she did so, citing an abundance of “new evidence.”

In a January 22, 2020 entry in her blog, she recently posted a poem from late American poet