Progress in the fight for public education.

• Author: Bryant, Jeff
• Position: COMMENT

Under an intense summer sun in America's hottest year in recorded history, an assortment of about 800 sign-carrying protesters and rabble-rousers gathered at the base of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to declare a victory in the fight over the nations education policy.

"We are winning," education historian Diane Ravitch declared in her address to the crowd, an exhortation she repeats often at public events and on her popular blog.

Since the publication of her best-selling 2010 book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Ravitch has become the most prominent voice for one side in the "education wars."

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In 2013, The New York Review of Books depicted a stern Ravitch facing off with former Washington, D.C., school chancellor Michelle Rhee. The publication described Ravitch and Rhee as "the two faces of American education."

Rhee, you may remember, was considered by many to be the leader of the movement known as "education reform" that was remaking education policies in big-city districts across the nation. She was featured on the cover of Time magazine holding a broom under the headline, "How to Fix Americas Schools," demonstrating her desire to sweep school districts clean of supposedly ineffective veteran teachers and stultified education practices.

The "reformers," as Rhee and her allies came to be called, generally backed mandates to impose new Common Core Standards championed by the Obama Administration, a stringent regime of standardized tests used for rating schools and evaluating teachers, and a rollout of competitive charter schools.

Ravitch dubbed the reform agenda a "reign of error" in her 2013 book by that name, and an alliance of parent groups, public education supporters, and civil rights and community activists also emerged to join with the two national teachers unions and call for a redirection of education policy.

Conflict over public education became especially divisive in the Democratic Party, where dissidents called education policies carried out by the Obama Administration "No Child Left Behind on steroids," a reference to the federal education act that passed during the George W. Bush Administration, which many believe codified the corporate education reform campaign.

"If you want to look at a really significant ideological divide among Democrats, you should look at education," Matthew Yglesias wrote in 2014 when he was at Slate (emphasis in the original).

After years of...