Diane Ravitch, "An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Oct 28, 2025

Diane Ravitch, a historian of education and former Assistant Secretary of Education, discusses her remarkable journey from promoting standardized testing and school vouchers to advocating for public schools and tackling poverty. She reflects on her relationships with influential thinkers and how her experiences shaped her views. Ravitch emphasizes the harms of high-stakes testing, the need for robust support for teachers, and her commitment to social justice. Her candid memoir reveals her transformation and calls for action against inequality in education.

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ANECDOTE

Personal Loss Shaped Her Choices

Ravitch described her marriage as socially ideal but emotionally abusive and sexist.
A pressured pre-Roe abortion and a lost child were pivotal traumas that contributed to the marriage's end.

ANECDOTE

Early Career Shaped At The New Leader

Ravitch got her early editorial training at The New Leader, working for very low pay and learning from exiles and thinkers.
She calls it her 'master's degree' in editing and political education.

ANECDOTE

Meeting Mary Changed Her Life

Ravitch met Mary at a humanities conference and their relationship led her to leave an unhappy marriage.
They stayed together from 1985 and married in 2012 when it became legal in New York.

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For many years, Diane Ravitch was among the country’s leading conservative thinkers on education. The cure for what ailed the school system was clear, she believed: high-stakes standardized testing, national standards, accountability, competition, charters, and vouchers. Then Ravitch saw what happened when these ideas were put into practice and recanted her long-held views. The problem was not bad teachers or failing schools, as conservatives claimed, but poverty. She denounced privatization as a hoax that did not help students and that harmed the public school system. She urged action to address the root causes of inequality. In An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else (Columbia UP, 2025) this passionate and timely memoir of her life’s work as a historian and advocate, Ravitch traces her ideological evolution. She recounts her personal and intellectual journey: her childhood in Houston, her years among the New York intelligentsia, her service in government, and her leftward turn. Ravitch shares how she came to hold conservative views and why she eventually abandoned them, exploring her switch from championing standards-based curriculum and standardized testing to arguing for greater investment in professional teachers and in public schools. Bringing together candid reflections with decades of research on education, Ravitch makes a powerful case for becoming, as she calls herself, “an activist on behalf of public schools.”

Diane Ravitch is a historian of education and a prominent commentator about education and politics. Her many books include Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (2013); The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (2010); and The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805–1973 (1974). Ravitch was assistant secretary of education under President George H. W. Bush and served on the national testing board during the Clinton administration. She is cofounder and president of the Network for Public Education

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