Re-education: conservative education scholar Diane Ravitch returns to her liberal roots.

• Author: Kahlenberg, Richard D.
• Position: 'The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education' - Book review

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

by Diane Ravitch

Basic Books, 288 pp.

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For many years, education historian Diane Ravitch traversed a familiar path among a certain kind of New York intellectual--beginning on the left in the 1960s and moving rightward over time, as she joined the Education Department of George H. W. Bush, endorsed private school vouchers, and became part of an influential education task force sponsored by the Hoover Institution. But as she outlines in her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, Ravitch's story adds a twist to this cliche: over the last few years, she has returned to her traditional liberal home. She has become one of the nation's leading critics not only of conservative educational policies like vouchers but of more centrist ideas too, like charter schools, testing, and merit pay for teachers.

She defends her movement away from conservative educational policies by referencing John Maynard Keynes's response to a critic after reversing himself on an economic question: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

The new Ravitch exhibits an interesting mix of support for public education and the rights of teachers to bargain collectively with a tough-mindedness that some on the pedagogical left lack; she supports a strong core curriculum and a no-nonsense approach on discipline, while casting a skeptical eye on efforts to artificially prop up student self-esteem. In this respect, she is like the great teacher unionist Albert Shanker, whom she describes in the book as a "mentor." (Full disclosure: I interviewed Ravitch for my 2007 biography of Shanker, and Ravitch wrote a blurb for my book.)

Ironically, Ravitch's return to the left comes precisely as centrist ideas are consolidating their hold on Washington. Even left-of-center thinking--at the Obama administration's Education Department, leading foundations and think tanks, and the editorial pages of the New York Times--has galvanized around greater emphasis on charter schools and performance pay for teachers based on test score gains. Teachers unions, meanwhile, are seen, as one union official told me, as the new Sister Souljah, an object to be denigrated in order to show independence. Ravitch's book comes at just the right time, providing a bracing and courageous corrective to the Washington conversation about education reform.

Ravitch says she supported Shanker's original proposal for charter schools, publicly funded institutions given flexibility to innovate in order to reach students who didn't perform well...