Joy Keys chats with Author Diane Ravitch about the American School System

Special Guest: Diane Ravitch, the nation’s foremost historian of education, warns that national education policy is on a path to wrecking our cherished tradition of public education. In this remarkable book, she describes how such strategies as accountability schemes based on questionable standardized tests, merit pay for teachers based on gains on the same unreliable tests, vouchers, and charter schools have been oversold as solutions for our educational problems. Ravitch explains why she became persuaded by accumulating evidence that policymakers are on the wrong track in pushing a market model of reform that ignores the realities of the classroom. The more they push these policies, she writes, the more they will harm our nation’s school system and undermine the quality of education. Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University and a historian of education. In addition, she is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. Ravitch is the author of more than twenty books, including The Language Police, The Great School Wars, The Troubled Crusade, The American Reader, The English Reader, and Left Back. A native of Houston, she is a graduate of the Houston public schools. She received a B.A. from Wellesley College in 1960 and a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1975.