By all measures, historian of education Diane Ravitch’s five-decade career as a writer, speaker, and advocate for public schooling has been jagged. A once-prominent conservative who supported charter schools, rigorous standardized testing, and tax-funded vouchers, Ravitch served in the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton before realizing that the agenda she had championed was doing a disservice to America’s children—and their teachers.
Her latest book, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else, is part memoir and part political analysis of what is needed to ensure that every child receives the instruction and support they need to thrive. Ravitch spoke to The Progressive in late August, shortly before the book’s publication. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Q: I’m impressed by your public admission that you were wrong about educational policy and have taken responsibility for your errors. Did doubt slowly accumulate, or was there an “aha” moment?
Diane Ravitch: It was a day-by-day thing. For several years, I was on the board of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Foundation, a conservative education policy think tank. The foundation sponsored twelve charter schools, and, over time, they all closed for reasons that included corruption by school administrators. It was the early 2000s, and the philosophy at the foundation was that these problems meant we needed to hire new leadership at the impacted schools. This was disillusioning, but it still took me a while to make a complete split.
Part of me was holding on to stories that frequently appeared in the mainstream media, which presented charters as an educational miracle. It was exciting to read about their achievements, at least until later stories reported that the schools had to close for one reason or another. I later learned that many charter schools raise their profiles by rejecting children with disabilities or behavioral issues or who come from unhoused families or families living in poverty. By the time I saw the pro-charter film Waiting for “Superman” in 2010, I was already pretty critical, so I guess it was the accumulated impact of articles and films that positioned charters as saving public education, because I knew that they didn’t do this.
Q: The Big Beautiful Bill signed by President Trump on July 4 will allow universal voucher programs in every state. Why is this likely to have a damaging impact on public education?
Ravitch: Universal vouchers subsidize tuition for children who were never planning to attend public schools and whose families can afford to pay their fees. I call it welfare for the rich.
Right now, the most hopeful thing I can say is that most children and families continue to go to public schools in their communities. But vouchers are dangerous because private schools are overwhelmingly unregulated, and there is typically no oversight of them. In most states, voucher schools are not accountable to anyone. Florida is the worst. In the 2023-2024 school year, voucher programs received $3.2 billion in state funding; last year, they received $3.9 billion. This is money that should have gone to public education.
Q: Do you think the community schools movement, where schools develop long-term, ongoing relationships with local health centers, housing agencies, and social welfare organizations, would have been a better way to improve public education?
Ravitch: I love the community schools movement. It brings people together and is the direction public education should have taken. But political forces in this country are aligned against the genuine reforms the community schools model offers and instead favor privatization.
Q: Who is behind the privatization movement?
Ravitch: At this point, there are three main groups of public school opponents who support privatization: free-market billionaires, evangelical billionaires, and prominent people who don’t fall into either camp, like [billionaires] Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates, who follow a business model. But what these two fail to acknowledge is, one, that schools are not businesses, and two, that businesses go under all the time.
Q: Who are the other players undermining public education?
Ravitch: Men like Texas billionaire Farris Wilks, pastor of the Assembly of Yahweh Seventh Day Church, and Texas billionaire Tim Dunn have made it clear that they want to replace public education with Christian schools, and they have worked hard to purge the state legislature in the Lone Star State of moderate Republicans. They’ve replaced them with ultraconservative, pro-charter, pro-voucher advocates through a political action committee they created and continue to fund.
Then there’s Jeff Yass, the richest man in Pennsylvania, whose net worth, according to Forbes, is $65.7 billion. He gave Texas Governor Greg Abbott $10 million to defeat lawmakers who oppose vouchers.
These people are Christian nationalists who believe the United States is a Christian nation and should be governed by biblical principles. Their ideas are dominant in many places; former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is a supporter [and another billionaire]. And it’s not just individuals who support these policies. The Council for National Policy is an under-the-radar group that, along with the American Legislative Exchange Council [ALEC], brings people on the right together. ALEC offers model bills that attack public education and unions and promote evaluating teachers based on their students’ test scores. Teachers find this demoralizing and believe evaluation should instead be based on whether their classrooms lift people up and bring communities together.
Q: Let’s talk more about teacher dissatisfaction. Many public school teachers have expressed frustration with the profession, and there are teacher shortages in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and special education in many parts of the country. What can be done about this?
Ravitch: Legislatures in many states are not only dictating how to teach but also what to teach. Teachers need adequate preparation. Once this is done, administrators and lawmakers need to get out of the way and let them teach. Money, of course, is very important, but giving teachers respect and autonomy is possibly more important in retention and job satisfaction.
Q: How have your former colleagues on the right reacted to you since you stopped supporting charters, testing, and vouchers?
Ravitch: For the most part, they treat me as if I’ve vanished off the face of the Earth. Some are hostile: One blogger actually called me a whore. But in addition to my policy shifts, I also lost friends when I divorced Dick [Ravitch]. He was always extremely social, and a lot of people who had been part of my life when we were together chose to stick with him over me. Dick died in 2023. It took a long time for us to heal from the split, but he and I eventually became friends. I miss him.
Q: You always supported unions, even when you worked for conservative organizations. That surprised me.
Ravitch: Dick and I were friends with many union leaders, including Victor and Betsy Gotbaum of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees [AFSCME] and Al Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers [AFT]. In addition, civil rights leader Bayard Rustin was a close friend, and I understood unions to be the most powerful force we have for people to rise into the working or middle classes. When I worked at the Department of Education under [George H.W.] Bush, we were in the same building as the AFT, and I’d frequently drop in and chat with Al. He was a great intellectual, and I loved talking to him. I later became friendly with his successors, Sandra Feldman and Randi Weingarten.
Q: What was it about rightwing ideology that initially appealed to you?
Ravitch: I grew up believing in meritocracy. I also believed it was best to be “colorblind” regarding race. I later learned that meritocracy is not all it’s cracked up to be, especially when applied to standardized test scores. In fact, if we allow scores to determine who rises, society can become even crueler than it already is, because those who succeed will believe they deserve to be in their positions. There’s no imperative to help others, because these others—low scorers on the tests—are seen as undeserving and inferior. I eventually understood that tests measure test-taking abilities and nothing else. Similarly, colorblind logic denies racism and its ongoing impact.
Q: You were also anti-feminist. How did your worldview change on the need for women’s equality?
Ravitch: Dick was anti-feminist and had very traditional views about gender. Moreover, when I was growing up, my mother was in charge of everything, but she acted submissive, so I was raised assuming women were always in second place.
I eventually got fed up with being dominated by Dick. He was an absolute sexist. Things began to change when I started to become successful in my own right. Once I began lecturing about education, it was enraging to come home and have him demand that I pick up his socks from the floor.
Q: What are your current priorities for both education and society more generally?
Ravitch: I am very concerned about racial justice. I support Medicare for All. I want to make sure all people have a secure roof over their heads. And I want to see a huge government investment in public schooling. I also remember Bayard Rustin telling me that if we want to improve society, we need to give people the tools they need to work and contribute, so I also hope people will have access to meaningful jobs.
The organization I founded in 2012, the Network for Public Education, is a networking group that connects people and helps them get involved in the educational equity movement. We send letters to Congress and to state lawmakers in opposition to charters and universal vouchers. We have an annual conference, and people tell us they leave feeling energized because they’ve connected with people in other states, or their own states, who are doing similar work.
As I wrote in the closing chapter of An Education, “I will use whatever time I have left to fight for the ideas I believe in, to love the people who mean the most to me, to do whatever I can to strengthen democracy in my beloved country, and to advance the common good.”