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Changing My Mind About Schools (and Everything Else) w/ Diane Ravitch
476 Plays16 days ago
“This is a book about my life, about admitting ‘I was wrong,’ and about how important it is to say it out loud,” is how our guest today, Diane Ravitch, begins her 2025 memoir, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else.
What follows is her incredible life’s journey spanning nearly nine decades, from learning to write as a left-hander using a quill pen at her Texas public school to becoming one of the most influential leaders of the modern conservative American education reform movement. Having spent the first half of her professional life in education policy advocating for national standards, testing, and accountability reform alongside charter schools and so-called school choice programs; as a founder of Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Assistant Secretary of Education during the George HW Bush administration, and serving on the board of the National Assessment for Educational Progress or NAEP (the “gold standard” of achievement assessments), however, as the opening quote reveals, after seeing this vision of education reform in action, she very publicly changed her mind about all of it.
Diane has now spent the last 15 years vigorously challenging the same education reform movement she helped build. Co-founding the Network for Public Education, and writing several best-selling books critical of testing, corporate influence in education policy, and privatization. “We must have a more generous, contemporary vision of public schools and what they can be,” she writes. “I will use whatever time I have to fight for the ideals 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.”
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Transcript
Introduction and Standardization in Education
00:00:00
Speaker
And I once heard Bill Gates give a talk to ah an audience of teachers and he gave it a speech on the virtues of standardization. And he said, you know, the great thing about standards is if you have a toaster and you plug it in in California and then you fly across the country and you plug it in in New York or Texas or Oregon or Iowa, it works and it works because there's standardization.
00:00:26
Speaker
And then I kept thinking, but children are not toasters and teachers are not toasters. People are different.
00:00:39
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Human Restoration Project podcast. My name is Nick Covington. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are David Nuffel, Alexander Gruber, and Simeon Frang.
00:00:52
Speaker
Thank you so much for your ongoing support. We're proud to have hosted hundreds of hours of incredible ad-free conversations over the years. So if you haven't yet, consider liking and leaving a review in your podcast app to help us reach more listeners.
Diane Ravitch's Memoir and Career Evolution
00:01:05
Speaker
And of course, you can learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, and connect with us everywhere on social media.
00:01:17
Speaker
This is a book about my life, about admitting I was wrong, and about how important it is to say it out loud. It's how our guest today, Diane Ravitch, begins her 2025 memoir, An Education, How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else.
00:01:34
Speaker
What follows is her incredible life's journey spanning nearly nine decades, from learning to write as a left-hander using a quill pen at her Texas public school to becoming one of the most influential leaders of the modern conservative American education reform movement.
00:01:51
Speaker
having spent the first half of her professional life in education policy advocating for national standards, testing, and accountability reform alongside charter schools and school choice programs, as a founder of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Assistant Secretary of Education during the George H. W. Bush administration, and serving on the board of the National Assessment for Educational Progress, or NAEP, the Gold Standard of Achievement Assessments.
00:02:19
Speaker
However, as the opening quote reveals, after seeing this vision of education reform in action, she very publicly changed her mind about all of it. Diane has now spent the last 15 years vigorously challenging the same education reform movement she helped build, co-founding the Network for Public Education and writing several best-selling books critical of testing, corporate influence on education policy, and privatization.
00:02:48
Speaker
We must have a more generous contemporary vision of public schools and what they can be, she writes. I will use whatever time I have to fight for the ideals I believe in, to love the people who mean the most to me, and do whatever I can to strengthen democracy in my beloved country and to advance the common good.
00:03:08
Speaker
Diane Ravitch, it's a privilege to have you join us today. Oh, hi, Nick. It's great to be with you. So, of course, I have to ask, you know, you've been writing about education policy for years. Again, we had mentioned dozens of books before the recording here. So why this book, an education, a memoir, and why now?
Motivations Behind Ravitch's Memoir
00:03:28
Speaker
Well, now is the time because I'm getting on up there. I'm 87. My mind is about 37, but my body says, uh-uh, you're older than that, and you don't have too many turns so on the as the sun goes round.
00:03:45
Speaker
ah So it it was time. And I've wanted, I would say for the past five years, I've been thinking of writing a memoir. And I think that my life is interesting because I've been through so many different phases. Growing up in Texas, being third of eight children, going to an Ivy League college, which was pretty unusual. Nobody else in my school did. I think one other person in my large public high school did.
00:04:12
Speaker
And I've been through some interesting ups and downs. And I wanted to tell the story. First of all, I wanted to tell it because, I don't know, i just felt this need to. And then I thought, the question that I've always been asked since 2010 when I wrote a book saying I was wrong is, why did you change your mind?
00:04:30
Speaker
So I thought, well, this would be an opportunity to say it, put it in print, and maybe in the future, no one will ask me that question anymore. So that's it. Yeah. It's sort of a bookend to answer all of any of those previously um unanswered questions. This is the final word on them.
00:04:48
Speaker
What I thought was so fascinating, Diane, was that you know you spend the first half of the book is really just about your life. um And I really enjoyed how... your personal life informing your professional views and values and how those changed over the course of your life. And I kept sharing ah clips of the book with colleagues um and just saying, I'm fascinated at everything that you've been involved with along the way here. I'll just share a couple of things for listeners. You attended the March on Washington in 1963. You were college friends with Madeline Albright.
00:05:23
Speaker
You had interactions with basically every U.S. president since JFK, several foreign leaders throwing in there. You were apparently in Poland when the Berlin Wall fell. and I chuckled at this, but you had a heated exchange with science fiction author Isaac Asimov when you were on the board of the New York Public Library over word processing programs back when...
00:05:47
Speaker
ah back when those were coming into the fore. um And I feel like that's just like a fraction of a fraction of all of the interesting stuff that's in here. It kind of felt like Forrest Gump in real life, right? Like here here is is every major event of the 20th century and here's Diane Ravitch's connection to it. And I just have to know, like as you were organizing
Personal Life and Historical Involvement
00:06:08
Speaker
this, Right. Like, again, almost nine decades, all of this for writing.
00:06:12
Speaker
Did you find ah a through line for all of these events or like a North Star that that guided you through all of them? Well, I wish I could say that there was, but there wasn't. its It was all very yeah a happenstance and being there. you know, that's just the that's the book, Being There. Right.
00:06:30
Speaker
um Chauncey Gardner. He was always in these important places. It was a book by, I think, Jersey Kaczynski. In any event, there I was. i was ah married to a politically engaged person. And he, ah because of my marriage to him, introduced me to people like Bayard Rustin. And it was because of him that we had dinner at the White House when Lyndon Johnson was president.
00:06:56
Speaker
ah But it was because of me that I had lunch with Gerald Ford and two other people. And, ah you know, on and on. And I met Jimmy Carter a couple of times, but I didn't even mention that.
00:07:08
Speaker
um And Reagan I had lunch with, but that wasn't because of my ex-husband. um that That was just, that's where I was. You were just in the scene. It just seemed like wherever things were happening, you were there. Like you worked at the publication, I forget the name of it, that published. oh The New Leader. Yeah, the New Leader, where they published and MLK's letter from a Birmingham jail.
00:07:31
Speaker
um Yeah, it just you you were blocks away from the assassination of Malcolm x on the hunt for Tiffany Lamps in New York City. Isn't that amazing? I just could not believe it. There's even there's even some small things that I just chuckled about. um The screening of, um ah oh shoot, what's the movie? Waiting for Superman. Barbara Walters falling on her face. Just just these small recollections. how How do you begin to organize you know a lifetime of these moments and decide what makes the page or not?
00:08:03
Speaker
Well, I kept thinking about, you know, should I really include that or am I just name dropping? And I thought, but it was such a good story. I can't leave it out. i can't remember if if I mentioned, I think this is one of the ones I left out that ah when I went on a visit to Yale at one point in my college career, ah the guy that I met with and and spent the evening chatting with was Terrence McNally.
00:08:25
Speaker
Now, A lot of people may not know his name. He's probably the most important playwright of of the past 50 years. And he wrote a lot of very popular shows that were on Broadway.
00:08:37
Speaker
And i didn't I don't think I mentioned that because that felt like name dropping. But I was trying not to name drop, but just to say, you know, this is something that happened that I saw that I was part of. And there was a lot of stuff like that.
00:08:50
Speaker
ah The best I could do was say that it was it's in chronological order. Yes, it is. it Literally, I think the first sentence is something like, um I was born at 12.01 a.m. in Houston, Texas. And then it just takes off from there. um Yeah. By the way, I was interviewed by a reporter, and I won't say who it was. And after we had a long and i I think not entirely friendly interview, he got back to me the next day and he said, by the way, my editor is going to want want to know this. When were you born?
00:09:20
Speaker
And I suddenly realized, don't think he read my book. I think he came to to the interview with a lot of preconceived ideas because he was challenging me. Have you ever changed your mind about anything? Have you changed your mind? And so all of his questions could have been asked without reading the book. And since he didn't read the first sentence, I don't think he read the book.
00:09:39
Speaker
Yeah, that that it's literally the first sentence of the first chapter. So um that's a pretty safe bet, I would say. Is there anything that you, you know, in reflecting, organizing and planning for the book that you think you've learned about yourself? Like, was there any insight that hit you to be like, oh, man, I hadn't thought about this thing or my life in this way before?
00:09:59
Speaker
Well, the amongst the people who are nearest and dearest to me, they talk about something that happened in the book, which I i was reluctant to write, but did, which was that I was abused by my father.
00:10:15
Speaker
And i had never talked to anyone about that before, except, you know, two people. And they were sworn not to tell anyone else. So I wrote about this in more detail than either of them knew.
00:10:26
Speaker
And subsequently, i always ask, well, how did that affect you? And I realized I've never really thought a lot about it. I've never really, and i know that it must have affected me. And I think that it probably made me somewhat aloof.
00:10:45
Speaker
And less likely to trust people, I think. But I don't know. You know, it's all just a guess. You never know. Yeah, that I mean, that was a really shocking, I guess, revelation in the book. And I think from a modern perspective, you know, as someone who who hasn't yet hit 40, I was really shocked to just about like the ambient misogyny.
00:11:08
Speaker
that was just suffused throughout, it seems like your your entire life, um which I think even makes the call in your 40s to like restart at everything from scratch, all that more like audacious um at a time when women didn't do that, um especially to be with their female partners.
00:11:31
Speaker
So it really a story of, you know, those tragic situations, too. But and also, you know, your triumph amidst all those mitigating circumstances. do I guess, do you see it that way, too, just to say?
00:11:44
Speaker
given all the experiences and and tragedies and hardship, like here you are um in 2026? Well, I guess I feel really great about the fact that the way I think of it is most of my people are, most most people my age already did. So therefore I feel that's a triumph that I'm here, that I'm talking, that I'm still writing. have a blog, I write every day on the v blog. I usually give give it over to other voices and and just use my blog as a it's a platform to help
00:12:14
Speaker
give people a wider audience and in some cases a narrower audience. But I like to think that, as I said, my mind is 37, but my body is definitely not.
00:12:25
Speaker
To kind of talk about your entree into education, you know, like you talk about how you weren't really into the idea of educating or teaching. And i think if I remember correctly,
Personal Challenges and Inspiration for Education Reform
00:12:38
Speaker
like your interest in education starts with attending a Black Panther meeting ah in New York City in the 60s? Well, it it wasn't attack interest it wasn't exactly Black Panther. It was a community meeting in Harlem of Black parents who were very angry about a school opening in their neighborhood. but And no one asked them their view about what kind of schools do they want. And then when the principal was appointed, nobody said ah to the parents, would you form a committee and interview people? They had no input, whatever. So they were very angry and they wanted community control.
00:13:12
Speaker
yeah It was part of my learning experience just to sit there is the literally as the only white person in the room and to hear their anger and their anguish. And that got me interested. But, you know, I had a number of experiences that pointed me in the direction that I went. ah One of them being that i i was working as a researcher for the Carnegie Foundation. And so they said, should we invest in this experiment?
00:13:40
Speaker
in New York City, the Ford Foundation has asked us to invest in an experiment in decentralization. And we want you to go to the districts where they're trying it out and come back and report to us. So that was one of the reasons why I went to the districts in the city. And there were some something like 30 of them, but three of them were in rebellion.
00:14:00
Speaker
And so I visited them, met with their leaders, and they would have never met me if I just called and said, hi, i'm I'm looking for a story here. but I called and said, I'm calling from the Carnegie Corporation. And they said, oh yes, you've got to come over and see what we're doing. And you've got to meet the leadership. So that was sort of my start.
00:14:18
Speaker
And what what really propelled me was that I decided, you know, this is also interesting. New York City had a two month teacher strike in 1968. And I thought, I've been wanting to write, this might be a good subject. I could write an article about the teacher strike.
00:14:35
Speaker
And so I offered it, proposed it as an article to the New York Times Magazine. And the editor there, whom I had met socially, said to me, ah well, if you propose, no, no, he says, I can't accept this as an article because you don't have any experience. But if you ever come up with an article called I Dance With My Dentist, that would really interest me.
00:14:55
Speaker
and Oh, that made me so angry. It made, I knew that it was a total put down. he had no an interest in publishing anything I wrote. And ah that was just pure sexism. So it made me determined to follow that story and write not the the article, but I eventually decided that's not an article, that's a book.
00:15:15
Speaker
And that was my first book. That's what really propelled me into education. And that was that that, the history of the New York City schools then? Is that what that was? Okay. And then when the book came out, it got a lot of attention.
00:15:26
Speaker
And then the only negative attention was people saying, you didn't go to the New York City public schools. How can you write their history? And my response was always, well, people are always writing about the Civil War, even though they weren't there. they right that's kind of That's kind of how history works, guys. I don't know if if you're new to this whole thing. You don't have to be there to write about it.
00:15:44
Speaker
But that's how that's how i get started. That is, I think, an interesting entrance into becoming a policy advocate and then doing the work that you were doing. And it it seems like that starting that work is also sort of the beginning of your personal transformation too. Like it sort of mirrors these things.
00:16:06
Speaker
you know, your entry into education and then, you know, you stepping, stepping out of ah your marriage in the forties to start your life over again. How did you see like the intersection of, you know, your personal life and the beginnings of your professional expertise and education?
00:16:24
Speaker
Well, I guess I've, I published my first book in 75 my, I have to say my husband was a very interesting man, a very accomplished guy very came from a very wealthy family, and he was very interested in politics. So we met a lot of important political figures as a result. And you know i sort of it I felt like I had everything. But the one thing I didn't have was, i guess, respect, um being able to pursue my career ah without feeling that I was somehow failing because I wasn't doing the dishes right or I wasn't picking his socks up off the floor. And in 1984, 1985, that's when I said, okay, I'm done with this. I had been married for 25 years. So I would say I gave it a good shot.
00:17:16
Speaker
And well i i met i met a woman who was a social studies teacher and she was a social studies teacher for 30 years. So she beat you on that. you Crushed it.
00:17:29
Speaker
And that changed my life. and And, you know, she was very encouraging and she didn't put me down. She didn't expect me to pick up her socks. ah And we've been together for 40 years.
00:17:40
Speaker
That's incredible. Yeah. That's another thing that I want to talk about, too, because you you casually slide into the conversation there in the book that, oh, Mary wants to go start this progressive school with Deborah Meyer and New York City and all of those. And meanwhile, you were like working at the Brookings, you know, you were really starting like, you know, your conservative education reform, the nucleus of that in the in the late 80s, early 90s.
00:18:07
Speaker
How did you bridge that gap? Here's Mary going off to ah to de to Debbie Meyer's school and here's you at Brookings. How does that work at home? you know Well, you know it worked fine. we didn't We didn't clash over education issues. We had a a great life. We went traveled a lot and saw a lot of you know Japan and ah Europe and India and so forth. So we we were having a really engaging, interesting, fun life together. And then I had become friendly before we went to Washington, i had become friendly with Deborah Meyer.
00:18:42
Speaker
And I tell the story in the book about how he or she was the kind of the leader of the progressive movement in New York City and really in some ways ah ah in the nation. And,
00:18:53
Speaker
She had reviewed one of my books in 1983, and she just excoriated me. And then she put me down in every way possible. And i so I was also friendly with Albert Schanker, who is the head of the teachers union, which is now the, it's the AFT.
00:19:11
Speaker
And I said to al I said, I don't get this, Deborah Meyer. She really, really doesn't like me. And I just don't understand why she's so down on me. and And he said, well, why don't you talk to her? I think you'd like her.
00:19:23
Speaker
And I said, oh, that's an interesting idea. So the next day I picked up the phone and called her school. And she was still running a school called Central Park East, which was like a a very notable progressive school and kind of doing her thing um in terms of meeting children where they were, making sure they were engaged and interested and enjoying. And, you know, she didn't, she hates standardized testing, all of those things that, uh, I was on the other side of.
00:19:51
Speaker
so I called her one day and I said, um Deborah, ah hi, this is Diane Ravitch. And I hear a gasp at the other end of the line. And I said, i i said you know my work.
00:20:04
Speaker
i'd like I'd like to see your work. Can I come and visit you? So there was a long pause and she said, well, of course. So I went up a day or two later to her school on 104th Street in East Harlem. And we spent a couple of hours talking.
00:20:19
Speaker
And since then, we've been fast friends. So, you know, she was she was part of my change of views as well because she and I blogged together at the Education Week, which was then really the premier education publication. And one week I would write a letter to her and the next week she would respond to me. And we kept this going back and forth for like, don't know, seven years.
00:20:41
Speaker
So I like to say, well, Deborah, my great change of view from conservative to liberal, it's all because of you. I'm blaming it on you. So she loved that. That's incredible. What a great story. And it's just, I think it harkens back to an era where education didn't seem so
Partisanship and Censorship in Education
00:21:00
Speaker
partisan. Obviously there were sides of things, but could you imagine having that today? you know Conversations with Fordham and i don't know what the what the equivalent of of Deborah Meyer's school would be today, but right I just don't see those same kinds of cross-pollination happening because obviously it had a huge impact in your life and we can see how that exchange of ideas can be so powerful.
00:21:23
Speaker
yeah I think that everything, including education, has become very conflict-ridden. And um people go to the barricades. I mean, know like the book banning that's going on now, and I know it's happening in Iowa, as it is in so many other states, where ah people are coming in and saying, well, you can't you can't have that book in the library.
00:21:44
Speaker
And, you know, someone might see it and it's inappropriate for them. And librarian might say, but no one's checked that book out in two years. Well, you can't have it. Take it out and get rid of this one get rid of that one. Then it if you were to ask them, well, what is it exactly you object to? And they'll look at their notes and they'll say, well, it says here. Now, they haven't read the book.
00:22:05
Speaker
Of course not. The people who want to ban books ought to ought to have to take a test and say, yes, I did read the book and this is what I objected to. And okay, we'll put this in the 16 and over category.
00:22:16
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. On the other hand, I can remember um there was like a book banning incident at the school district that I was working at that led us to have to fill out paperwork for the school board if we wanted to teach a new book.
00:22:30
Speaker
And one of the requirements for adding a new book was listing any potentially objectionable content. Which, you know, if you take anything, any book out of context and just list the parts that may be potentially objectionable, you know, no school board is going to go to bat to add new books. And lo and behold, the whole time, you know, I was I was there, we weren't able to add any you know new um novels or nonfiction or anything else to the to the curriculum formally because of that.
00:23:00
Speaker
Well, Nick, you you may not know this, but years ago, I'm talking about 2006, I published a book called The Language Police, which is a book about the history of censorship. And it goes back to the beginning of of basically in this country, public education, where someone would say, well, you can't teach that. and Well, it's in a Shakespeare play. No, you can't teach that anyway. So there were people who went through Shakespeare's plays that were taught in school and would delete whole sections of them because they'd say, well, children shouldn't be exposed to that.
00:23:32
Speaker
But there were also lots of other books i throughout the 19th century and and the 20th century where someone said, you have to cut that out. And so when they would get, when stories would get reproduced in anthologies, they would eliminate anything that anyone found objectionable.
00:23:49
Speaker
And, you know, part of the language, please, was just saying, we're doing this now with textbooks. And so I had a list of 800 words that you'll never see in a textbook. You might find it amusing. you Take a look at it. It's funny. I'm Today, yeah the word landlord would be unacceptable because it's sexist. or if you show You can show elderly people, but you can't show them with a cane or sitting in in a rocking chair because that's ageist.
00:24:17
Speaker
And so there are all these things you're not allowed to show or say or write um because somebody is going to be somebody somewhere is going to be offended. there There's just a long, long list of forbidden topics. And then I found that all the publishers were using these lists.
00:24:33
Speaker
And i got I got copies of the list from publishers, all the big education publishers. they were They're called Bias and Sensitivity Guidelines. I think today those movements, that if that sentiment has always been there, it feels like those movements today are really supercharged by new tools and technologies. you know It could just be someone posting on social media. They found this in their kid's book that they brought home. you know in Absent any kind of context, that gets picked up by, i don't know, mainstream media or the president of the United States. And now you know the district gets bomb threats because they had this line in a book in their library. it just It's an escalation of all those tendons. It's really gotten out of control. And the internet is largely responsible for that.
00:25:18
Speaker
Because if, as you say, somebody might hear about something and then it gets magnified and over and over again. and And then there are people who've actually read the contested books and they make a list and they'll say, well, on page 22, the book says this. And then on page 29, it says that. and And so they'll have these like clip sheets. of what's objectionable without it.
00:25:41
Speaker
And everyone else who sees their work just takes it on, on their word that this is a bad book. But, you know, I have to say, and I'll be honest about this. I wish someone would ban my book.
00:25:53
Speaker
It does wonders for sales. I'll go to the school board. I'll go to bat for you, Diane. i'll like Get these books out of here. Yeah. Well, i I was at a museum the other day in New York City called the Morgan Library, and they have a wonderful bookstore of, you know, that's where you find great stuff is at museum bookstores. They had a book called Baby's First Book of Banned Books.
00:26:15
Speaker
ah So like A is for whatever, B is for, F is for Fahrenheit 451, et cetera, et cetera. That's amazing. you can't yeah You can't start censoring too too early.
00:26:29
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. To kind of bring things back to, um i guess, ed reform, which I don't even i don't even know what what you would call it today, but like...
00:26:39
Speaker
Back in the 90s and 2000s through the 2010s, there was like sort of a coherent idea about education reform being, you know, a set of standards, whether they're national um or otherwise. And being accountable to those through testing, parental choice, through charters, vouchers, and these other kinds of things, those sort of became the bedrock you know of what became the education reform movement so-called. And you know what kind of led you in that that direction and in those values initially you know in your work?
00:27:15
Speaker
Well, I became a supporter of school choice in the when I was working in the George H.W.
Role in Government and Policy Critique
00:27:22
Speaker
Bush administration. I'm a graduate and a product of public education, so I never had bad feelings about it because benefited from it. You know I didn't think it was bad. But then um it became kind of an end thing to go around and say, our schools are failing.
00:27:39
Speaker
ah The Reagan administration produced a pamphlet called a Nation at Risk, and they said our schools are failing, we're mediocre, kids don't take their schooling seriously, blah, blah, blah. And so I was kind of echoing that line. And then that was part of the reason I think I was chosen to join the George H.W. Bush administration. And we were pushing for standards and we wanted a national test, but it was illegal to have a national test. So we were promoting standards and we were also promoting the idea that accountability, very important to have accountability for schools, for teachers,
00:28:15
Speaker
And then along, then came George H.W. Bush. And I have to say, President Clinton echoed the same line. He came between the two Bushes, and he was in favor of national standards and national tests.
00:28:28
Speaker
And his views were really not very different from George H.W. Bush or even George W. Bush. There was a lot of continuity from a nation at risk all the way through to, um I would say, through the end of the Obama term.
00:28:43
Speaker
And they were all promoting the same vision, which was the thing that'll make schools successful and everyone will get a high test scores is if you test, test, test, and you show them, here's how you take the test. Here's how you succeed at the test. Here's what we expect of you. And then if they don't get the test score, you you punish their school, maybe even close their school, punish their teacher.
00:29:06
Speaker
Give them a teacher an evaluation and a rating saying, your scores didn't go up, you're going to be fired. And then you start firing teachers. So you really crack down. You crack down on teachers. You crack down on schools. You make it ah very punitive unless you get those high scores.
00:29:21
Speaker
And then here we are. Nation at Risk came out during Reagan's term, 1983. And here are, it's 2026. so here we are and it's night and it's twenty twenty six And we have had really nonstop testing, testing, testing, standards, testing, um choice.
00:29:42
Speaker
And all it's done really is to and to take money away from public schools and to create schools that are more segregated than ever, meaning private schools. The the church schools are indoctrinating kids into their religion.
00:29:58
Speaker
ah The charter schools have not been any better than regular public schools, and they take money away from regular public schools. I am a strong, I mean, this has been been the big change in my life.
00:30:08
Speaker
I went through a period of being a supporter of standards, testing, and accountability and choice. And as I saw the results come in and I realized that achievement gap is built into standardized testing, we will never close the achievement gaps. When people talk about, we've got to close the achievement gap and we have to test more.
00:30:28
Speaker
No, the nature of standardized testing is that the achievement gap is going to be based on a normed test. A normed test means that you've got a bottom and a top and they never ever close.
00:30:42
Speaker
So it's designed The standardized tests are designed on a norm that never closes. You will always have an achievement gap. There will always be a top and a bottom. And what really changed my view of the world and of education was to realize that it's the rich kids are always at the top and the poor kids are always at the bottom.
00:31:01
Speaker
And if you don't do something to remediate and improve the lives of the kids at the bottom, nothing will ever change. That all that testing was enriching the testing companies and, ah diverting money from teachers and from the things that schools need, like capital repairs, and doing nothing to help children. what i mean, if children don't have medical care, if they don't have a roof over their head, if they don't have ah nutritious meals at least once, twice, or three times a day, they're not going to do well in school.
00:31:34
Speaker
If they're sick because they don't have medical care, you know, they have all the negative impacts, social influences, and they don't do well at school. That should not be a surprise. And so, sure, you can, a journalist can say, I found a poor kid who got high test scores. Great.
00:31:49
Speaker
That's not true, though, of poor kids. Poor kids get the lowest scores. And it is as sure as the sun comes up in the morning and goes down at night, that rich kids have the scores at the top and poor kids have the scores at the bottom. And that had a huge impact on me because all that testing was not helping poor kids. And the same sense, choice is not helping poor kids. It's actually making things worse. it's It is endangering and destroying the public school system by making schooling worse.
00:32:22
Speaker
more segregated by having all these publicly funded private schools that don't accept the kids that they don't want. i mean, that's the great hidden secret of school choice is it's the schools choose. And the schools choose the kids that are easiest to educate and leave the toughest cases for public schools.
00:32:41
Speaker
Everything that you're speaking to seems to point to, you know, from 1983, clear through No Child Left Behind, and then seeing the fruits of that whole movement, those two decades really come to pass in the early two thousand s You think of that period of early implementation, you know, between that time and the early 2000s and sort of when you had your break in 2010, you seem to be responding to the evidence is here. um I was responding. I was responding to reality.
00:33:15
Speaker
And, you know, what was most disappointing for me is I'm not I was not being partisan. This is not just George H.W. Bush or George Bush. Bush, it's also Clinton and Obama.
00:33:27
Speaker
And Obama's program was in a continuation of No Child Left Behind. Obama's program was called Race to the Top. It was really a horrible program because it was initiated at the time we had this big depression recession that was not quite a depression. But the big recession was 2008. And then Obama's elected then. And he brings in Arne Duncan. And Congress says, we're going to have to end the recession by putting out lots of money and reviving the economy. And Arne Duncan was given $100 billion dollars to reform the schools. And Arne Duncan was part and parcel of this so-called reform movement. and I call it the corporate reform movement.
00:34:07
Speaker
And it's a corporate reform movement because it really actually has no public support. There are no groups of parents, except the ones who are paid, who are supporting Susan stakes testing and school choice i mean there's lots of choice in the public schools as they exist, I mean, maybe even too much choice, but the public schools offered lots of choice.
00:34:31
Speaker
Susan they've been bogged down by this whole approach of testing and testing and testing and then punishing people punishing teachers firing teachers closing schools.
00:34:42
Speaker
And Arne Duncan, Obama's secretary of education, was a great advocate of closing schools and firing teachers if their scores didn't go up. And that's no way to build a school system. That's no way to educate children. It's a very punitive and and basically a failed approach to education.
00:35:02
Speaker
And I'm so curious then, what what do you think is the divide between education policies that work, right, that we understand, whether they're like um social policies that give kids eyeglasses, for example. i've I've read a study that kids in Baltimore who got eyeglasses saw, you know, huge test score gains. and you don't have to change anything about school choice or classroom pedagogy or whatever. Just give kids glasses who need glasses, for example.
00:35:30
Speaker
But like, why are the sort of zombie policies, the ones that the unsinkable rubber ducks, I'll just keep mixing my metaphors here, but why are these the ones that soak up all of our time and attention on school choice and testing and accountability when, like you've said, we're in like year 30?
00:35:48
Speaker
of these ideas that clearly don't, they don't work to do the things that they claim to do. And if they did, we would have ample evidence of that right now, but we don't, but they don't go away. Why don't they go away? dia Why can't we get new ideas? It's very, very ah simple explanation. It's called the the money. And I mean, my the first book that you read where I changed my mind was called the the death and life of the great American school system. how testing and choice are undermining education.
00:36:19
Speaker
And what i I had a chapter in that book called The Billionaire Boys Club, where i showed that the big foundations, in particular, the Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation Arkansas, and also the Broad Foundation, which I don't know if it still exists, but the billionaire there was Eli Broad, a billionaire in in Los Angeles, And the three of them were putting hundreds of millions of dollars into more testing, more choice, and more accountability, and the more punitive, the better.
00:36:50
Speaker
And Gates honestly believed, I'm not saying these are bad people, they honestly believed And it was rather technocratic. If they just applied this medicine, then the schools would all produce kids who got 100.
00:37:01
Speaker
a hundred And there wouldn't be any kids left behind, no child left behind, which is a ridiculous idea. Because if you've been a teacher, as you have been, if you've been a parent, if you've observed how kids learn, there's never going to be a class where everybody gets 100, unless you have a highly gifted school and you've weeded out everybody except the kids who get 100. So if you if you choose carefully, you can get that kind of a class, but you'll never get ah ah a random assignment class where everybody is learning at the same pace. So Obama, through Arne Duncan,
00:37:36
Speaker
And through the building through Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation promoted something called Common Core, which I'm sure you're familiar with. And the Common Core was based on the assumption that if everybody had the same textbooks and everybody had the same standards and everybody had tests based on those standards and every teacher learned the standards and taught the standards,
00:37:56
Speaker
that everybody would come out with exactly the same grades. Nobody would left be left behind because they've all learned the same thing in the same way, blah, blah, blah. And I once heard Bill Gates give a talk to ah an audience of teachers, and he gave it a a speech on the virtues of standardization.
00:38:13
Speaker
And he said, you know, the great thing about standards is If you have a toaster and you plug it in in California and then you fly across the country and you plug it in in New York or Texas or Oregon or Iowa, it works.
00:38:27
Speaker
And it works because there's standardization. And then I kept thinking, but children are not toasters and teachers are not toasters. People are different and kids learn in different ways. They're interested in different things. Teachers have different teaching styles that work for some kids, don't work for others. And standardization is not the answer to whatever the issues are.
00:38:53
Speaker
But he was a great enthusiast for his standardization. I know that Broad is no longer engaged in education policy, but between the three of them, they put a lot
Critique of Standardization and Privatization
00:39:03
Speaker
of money. And that money is now involving many more than those three billionaires. I wrote a book a couple of years ago,
00:39:11
Speaker
called Slaying Goliath, in which I, among other things, not only was I celebrating the people who stood up and said, you're not taking my public school away, but I made a list of the billionaires, all the billionaires I could find who were supporting this version of corporate reform, which was very punitive.
00:39:28
Speaker
It's a very long list. It's like every billionaire in the country, with very few exceptions, is pouring money into privatizing our schools. In privatization, if there's one policy that we know has failed, it's privatization.
00:39:41
Speaker
Because when you give public money to private schools, the first thing is, well, they don't have to be tested because they're not public. And the religious schools, they don't have to be tested because they're not public. So you actually create an incentive for kids to leave public school and go to a school where they're not going to be tested and where the results won't be reported. And so you have a a state like Florida.
00:40:02
Speaker
They have ah vouchers for everybody who wants them. Well, don't you know that most of the vouchers are going to kids who never attended a public school? So they''re they're subsidizing the kids who are already in private school, the kids who are already in religious schools. And in every state, this is the case, every state with vouchers that has that has universal vouchers, and there are more and more of them. I know that Arizona, Ohio, New Hampshire, Arizona,
00:40:29
Speaker
Florida, and and I think Texas, and there are a few others. Anyone who wants a voucher can have it. So your income may be $600,000 a year, that's okay.
00:40:40
Speaker
You're entitled to a voucher for each of your children. It may be worth $10,000 each, but at some point the public is not going to just keep upping money for education or they don't up it at all. And there's less and less for public schools.
00:40:52
Speaker
Public schools end up getting the kids who the the private schools don't want. And that's terrible. It's a terrible, especially because our society is already so riven with divisions.
00:41:04
Speaker
The Public school was the one place that brought us all together. And now these billionaires who ah don't want to pay taxes to pay for schools, they are they are dividing us up into more and more segregated pods when when so that children go to school with kids who are just like them.
00:41:23
Speaker
I think if we could say pretty confidently that privatization and I guess like the, the more ass of ideas sort of around feeding into that, um, is probably the biggest concern. I mean, you've, you've written about it. I know Josh Cowan has written a book about it through vouchers. And obviously we've, we've talked about Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider's work. Um, education wars and Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door. I think there's been a lot of focus on like this as the key um grounding concern of of this age.
00:41:55
Speaker
I guess to turn that on its head, is there anything like positive? Is there a trend in education right now? Like look, thinking of the scope. of your your interest in your life here that gives you a sense of hope or a good of goodness? Is there something good happening that we can say, you know, there's hope for a better future in education because of this?
00:42:17
Speaker
Well, you know, when I wrote Slaying Goliath, it it was, my intention was to give hope to people and to spotlight people who have fought back against the voucher crowd and won, who have fought to maintain their public schools.
00:42:31
Speaker
And they're they're fighting this this massively funded group of organizations that claim to be grassroots, butter but they're all paid. What gives me hope right now, the last story that gives me hope, and then every day it might be something different. Right now it's that I read a story in Education Week about a school in Connecticut, an elementary school, that decided to bring back play.
Innovative Approaches to Learning
00:42:58
Speaker
So instead of, you know, we've been pushing the academics down to the point where even pre-K is expected to read, which is ridiculous. it's ah They should be playing. Kindergarten kids should be playing. And what the teachers there have been doing is that they learn from each other.
00:43:15
Speaker
how to use play as a way of teaching what the standards say you're supposed to teach. And they're very successful on the standards. they're They're like the number one rated school in the state right now. And everything that they teach is done through a play-based approach.
00:43:30
Speaker
And I thought, wow, isn't that great? The only thing that's bad is that you have to judge play by test scores, which is ridiculous. But the kid the kids are learning science by building toys and measuring things to build the toys. They're learning math, they're learning science, they're learning how things work, taking things apart, putting them together, going out into the nature and learning about the biology of of plants and and little critters. um You know, play is very engaging. Kids are motivated. And the one thing that you can't say about tests is that kids are motivated because it's just like a pun ah punitive thing to say, can you get the right answer to this stupid question?
00:44:13
Speaker
Now read this passage, which comes from a book that you never read and answer, you know, it's maybe a question about, I don't butterflies or World of War I or whatever, but it's all out of context and read this snippet and pick the right answer.
00:44:29
Speaker
And one of the reasons that I turned against standardized testing was that I spent seven years on the the National Testing Board. National Testing Board is called the National NAGB, National Assessment Governing Board.
Issues with Standardized Testing
00:44:40
Speaker
And it produces something called NAEP. NAEP is the the st the national federal test that kids take every other year for reading and math and sometimes for other subjects. And by now, the Trump administration may have actually wiped out the funding for NAEP, so I don't know if it'll continue. but People like to point to NAEP and they say, look, our test scores haven't gone up. This is terrible. We're failing, failing, failing.
00:45:05
Speaker
Well, the test scores did go up. They went up substantially ah during the period in which we were integrating schools. ah they went They went up in response to spending more money on preschool education.
00:45:19
Speaker
But they've been essentially flat ever since we started this so-called reform movement where it's all tests, tests, tests. So um I think... There's something to be said for sampling, but I don't like the idea of giving kids tests and then say, you failed, you failed again, you failed last year, you failed again. you At some point, the kids lose all motivation because they're <unk> never going to get, the given the nature of the standardized test, there's always got to be a bottom half.
00:45:48
Speaker
And if you're always in the bottom half, at a certain point, you lose all motivation. And what I learned as a member of the NAGBI board, i'd I'd review questions and I'd say, well, this question is idiotic.
00:46:02
Speaker
No, this is going to be on the test. Or I'd look at the answers and I'd say, I don't i don't understand. Two of the answers are are correct. I could make a case. There four answers here. Two of them are clearly wrong. Two of them, either one conceivably could be the right answer.
00:46:15
Speaker
And, you know, that's okay. that It's like tricking kids by putting a tricky a tricky right answer and ah and a real right answer. Because It's just not the way to to learn. It's not the way to motivate kids. And without motivation, I guess John Dewey said it first, interest will get you there faster than effort. Interest and effort are both important. But if you don't have interest, you're not going to have effort.
00:46:41
Speaker
Yeah. I think especially for kids for whom, you know, they're going to take four 50 question tests a day for a week to see how much they're learning at a certain point, the answer becomes E, ah who cares? You know, I'm just going to fill in the bubbles so I can get done with this as soon as possible.
00:46:58
Speaker
But the test can't discriminate between a kid who gets the answer wrong because they just guessed and, um, uh, or we got it right because they guessed because they didn't care. And a kid who actually knows and, you know, prescribes its interventions accordingly. And it's, It's so interesting that, you know, we come full circle back to play when I kind of see that as a, that's like a basic human need. It's like saying kids learn better when they have eaten healthy food or when they have breathed clean air. Yeah, when they have it. So so that's that to me is like that's like the play is the floor. That's not the that's not the ceiling. That's not the new hotness. That's not an intervention. That's we got to provide that alongside, you know, safe, clean learning environments and everything else that we would expect. You know, just to go to Iowa for a moment, I can remember years ago, Iowa used to be held up as the gold standard of education. And, you know, the the test that kids would take would be the i Iowa test of test the basic skills. yeah And kids all over the country took that test. But they took the test and the teachers who taught them would know the answer on the same day or the next day.
00:48:08
Speaker
Now, with standardized tests today, the tests are designed somewhere. God knows where, you know, maybe they're designed in California or Massachusetts California. wherever, Virginia.
00:48:19
Speaker
And the kids are given the test and the tests are sent away and they're scored. and the And the kids take the test in March and the answers come back to to a teacher in September.
00:48:31
Speaker
Now, it's not the same teacher that the child had in March. It's a different teacher. And when the teacher gets the answer, she doesn't know how the student answered each question. She just gets a score or he just gets a score.
00:48:45
Speaker
And that means that the teacher has nothing to tell the parents or the kid about what they need to improve. All they can say is you're at the bottom or you're in the top 90 percentile or you're on the bottom 10 percentile. And I compare this to going to a doctor and he examines you and you say, oh, I've got this terrible pain in my stomach. And he says, all right, I've examined you. I'll i'll get back to you in six months.
00:49:09
Speaker
And he gets back to you in six months. And of course the pain isn't there anymore. It may be somewhere else. And he says, you know, I've discovered that you're in the top 10 percentile for people your age. Oh, okay. But what medicine should I take? Well, he said, that's, I don't really know because I don't know i don't know the answers to any particular questions. And I can recall when the when the standardized testing for Common Core first started, at some point on my blog, I was publishing questions because I was sent them by a teacher.
00:49:40
Speaker
And they I got a call from a testing company saying, we're going to sue you if you don't take those questions off your block. Those questions are proprietary. They belong to the testing company. And I said, well, how are kids supposed to learn what they are? How are supposed teachers supposed to learn if they don't know where kids' weaknesses are?
00:49:58
Speaker
And they said, that's none of our business. None of your business. Don't publish any questions. So the teachers are not allowed to see the answers to the questions. They were not allowed allowed to discuss them or to write about them.
00:50:10
Speaker
That means nobody knows what was tested and nobody knows what the answers were. They just know the score. How does that help anybody?
Corporate Influence and Teaching Techniques
00:50:17
Speaker
And at the same time, every single... move that we've made under that corporate education reform paradigm clear through race to the top and and the common core was designed to give those companies more money because we put dollars into the testing and evaluation and development of these things. And I think now we sort of see that on the curriculum side, right? Where Now, to be able to teach reading in a particular way or to teach math in a particular way, you don't train teachers and you don't um you know value experience and expertise. You buy a box.
00:50:55
Speaker
you buy ah You buy this box curriculum and expect everyone to stick to the the letter and the page number and everything else as you go. And you're teaching a curriculum. You're not teaching children, per se. Right, right. Well, I am...
00:51:09
Speaker
very much opposed to mandating, to legislators mandating how to teach because they can't teach. So why should they tell you how to teach? And they're doing it all over the country. not that They're mandating the science of reading.
00:51:22
Speaker
And it's too long to get into in this show, but I know the history of the science of reading. And there will come a time 10 years from now when we'll look back and say, well, why did we do that? Because that's been the history of reading since the 1840s. We have gone back and forth, exactly, pendulum swing from we need phonics, we don't need phonics, we need phonics, we don't need, back and forth. And the truth is, yeah, we do need phonics, but there are many different ways to teach it. And it shouldn't be the only thing that kids learn because back in No Child Left Behind, which would have been 2001 to 2007 or so, there was an evaluation. They they actually applied the science of reading.
00:52:02
Speaker
And they spent $6 billion dollars in federal funds testing the science of reading. And the evaluation showed that kids were better at phonics, but they didn't comprehend any better.
00:52:16
Speaker
So what was the good of that? What's the point? If you can say, I can sound out cat, but I don't understand the sentence. I'm sorry. Hey, theirre their their phonics scores went up though, Diane. So I think this success. So, you know, it's it's important to...
00:52:32
Speaker
to understand that the everybody learns differently, teachers teach differently, teachers have to be very well prepared, and they don't need to be constantly monitored by the federal or the state gu government.
00:52:46
Speaker
And they don't need to be judged by test scores either, because if you bear in mind, that's one fundamental fact, the rich kids get the highest scores and the poor kids get the lowest scores. And the thing that the state can do is make sure that they that the kids are well
Community Schools and Social Concerns
00:53:01
Speaker
fed,
00:53:01
Speaker
have access to medical care, and have the social services that their families need, which is why I've become a great proponent of community schools. Community schools are schools that are not just, ah you know, 8.30 to 3 and the doors are locked, but rather their after-school hours are used to give kids extra services, extra tutoring, and they also encourage families to come in and can connect them with social services that are available, but they don't know about.
00:53:29
Speaker
So, you know, and have a food pantry and have a clothes in case kids don't have a winter coat and they can get a winter coat. So all these things make sense, but we don't do them. Instead, under this and Trump administration, it's all about privatization. It's all about homeschooling and charter schools and vouchers in religious schools. And if it's up to President Trump, who doesn't belong to a church so far as I know, everyone would be in a religious school.
00:53:58
Speaker
The irony, Diane, as as our time kind of comes to a close here, you know, there's not every 87-year-old has just published a book and then it comes on a podcast to talk about it.
00:54:11
Speaker
So I just have to know you know, you've had this long career of advocacy, critique, critical reflection, introspection. You've said multiple times, you know, you feel like a 30-year-old in an 80-something's body. Where are you focusing your energy and your your hope and and your attention now?
00:54:31
Speaker
Well, I have to say that I am obsessed with the destruction of our democracy that's happening every day. I'm very upset that the Department of Health and Human Services has decided to cut back on the vaccines given the children. Children will die.
00:54:49
Speaker
And we don't need to have more testing to find out that children will die. We already know that. We have lots of experience. I'm very upset that the Department of Justice has been turned into a political armor of the White House because we need an independent and strong Department of Justice. I'm upset with all the people who've been laid off, ah who in most cases were senior people with decades of experience.
00:55:12
Speaker
And I think that You know, when I think about what Elon Musk did with his Doge group, just going through and and cutting off foreign aid and knowing that hundreds of thousands of children would die and families.
00:55:26
Speaker
And I just I want to see a better America. I want to see the America that I grew up dreaming about. I want to see the America of my childhood, which was a the good country.
00:55:37
Speaker
We were the good country and the great country. And people wanted to come here because we were good and great. And now we're just mean and cruel. And um I'm so happy with every time I see a story about people standing up and saying, these people are our neighbors, you can't take them away.
00:55:53
Speaker
I'm very upset every time I see somebody in with an ice a uniform on, mask and no badge, in an unmarked car, grabbing people off the street. This is not America.
00:56:04
Speaker
So my energy and my passion comes from my passion to see our country become what it what it's supposed to be, which is good. And we're it's good people, and we need to reassert our good values.
00:56:19
Speaker
Well, thank you so much, Diane. This has been such ah a pleasure and a privilege to talk with you today. Well, thank you, Nick. It's been wonderful to talk with you, and I encourage you to continue doing all the great things you're doing.
00:56:32
Speaker
Thank you again and for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
00:56:44
Speaker
Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free our website, humanrestorationproject.org. Thank you.