Leading scholar's u-turn shakes up school reform debate

Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration's Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling. Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups. "School reform today is like a freight train, and I'm out on the tracks saying, 'You're going the wrong way!'–Dr. Ravitch said in an interview. Dr. Ravitch is one of the most influential education scholars of recent decades, and her turnaround has become the buzz of school policy circles.