Diane Ravitch

Diane Ravitch was born July 1, 1938, in Houston, Texas, one of eight children in a Jewish family that valued reading over almost everything else in the house. She graduated from San Jacinto High School and Wellesley College in 1960, then worked as an editorial assistant at the small, fiercely anti-communist magazine The New Leader before turning to the history of American education. Under the historian Lawrence Cremin at Columbia's Teachers College, she earned a doctorate in 1975 and stayed on the faculty for 15 years, building a reputation as a rigorous critic of progressive pedagogy and a defender of a demanding academic curriculum for every child, regardless of income.

Ravitch served as Assistant Secretary of Education under President George H. W. Bush from 1991 to 1993, then sat on the National Assessment Governing Board through 2004, years in which she was one of the country's most prominent advocates for standardized testing, charter schools, and market-style competition among public schools. In 2010 she published The Death and Life of the Great American School System, a bestseller announcing that she no longer believed either high-stakes testing or school choice would deliver the gains their advocates promised, and that poverty, not bad teachers, best predicted low scores. She followed it with Reign of Error in 2013, the same year she co-founded the Network for Public Education, and has kept a policy blog since 2012 that has drawn more than 36 million page views.

The reversal cost her the constituency that had made her influential. Reformers who once quoted her approvingly, and administrations that kept No Child Left Behind's testing architecture under new names, treated her about-face as a defection rather than a correction, and for years she was dismissed as often as she was cited. She has said the change came gradually, from watching the policies she helped design produce narrowed curricula and school closures in poor neighborhoods rather than the gains promised, and has called her earlier certainty about market mechanisms one of the larger mistakes of her career. Critics on the reform side make the opposite case: that Ravitch simply traded one absolute position, enthusiasm for testing and choice, for an equally sweeping opposition to both.

Ravitch turned 88 in 2026 and still posts several times a week on her blog, tracking test scores, charter closures, and school-choice legislation with the intensity she once brought to advocating for the opposite policies. Whether her reversal amounted to intellectual honesty or a swing from one overcorrection to another is still argued inside education research the way it was in 2010, with charter advocates continuing to cite the sector's gains and Ravitch continuing to cite its scandals and closures. No consensus has settled the argument either way, and Ravitch, still writing, has shown no sign of considering it closed.

Diane Ravitch's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• The Death and Life of the Great American School System book
  Bestseller announcing her reversal on testing and school choice 2010
• Reign of Error book
  National bestseller on the dangers of school privatization 2013
• Network for Public Education other
  Advocacy organization co-founded with Anthony Cody 2013
• Slaying Goliath book
  On the resistance to school privatization 2020
• An Education book
  Memoir revisiting her change of mind on school reform 2025

• July 1, 1938 aged 0 Born in Houston, Texas
• 1960 aged ~22 Graduates from Wellesley College
• 1975 aged ~37 Earns a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University
• 1991 aged ~53 Becomes Assistant Secretary of Education Serves under President George H. W. Bush through 1993.
• 2010 aged ~72 Publishes The Death and Life of the Great American School System Announces her reversal on testing and school choice.
• April 2012 aged 73 Launches her education policy blog
• 2013 aged ~75 Co-founds the Network for Public Education
• 2025 aged ~87 Publishes the memoir An Education

• Michelle Rhee b. 1969
  Former chancellor of D.C. public schools who became a polarizing figure in education reform debates. opposed
• John Dewey 1859–1952
  Philosopher and educational reformer whose progressive ideas shaped modern American pedagogy. engaged the legacy of
• George H. W. Bush 1924–2018
  41st president who managed the end of the Cold War and assembled the coalition for the Persian Gulf War. appointed by
• Barack Obama b. 1961
  44th President and first African American to hold the office, known for the Affordable Care Act. opposed the policies of