Diane Ravitch

“American Education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them, for it threatens to destroy public education. Who will Stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?”

“A historian tries to understand what happened, why it happened, what was the context, who did what, and what assumptions led them to act as they did. A historian customarily displays a certain diffidence about trying to influence events, knowing that unanticipated developments often lead to unintended consequences.”

“Accountability makes no sense when it undermines the larger goals of education.”

“The greatest obstacle to those who hope to reform American education is complacency.”

“American education has been littered with failed fads and foolish ideas for the past century.”

“Congress and state legislatures should not tell teachers how to teach, any more than they should tell surgeons how to perform operations.”

“Public education is not broken. It is not failing or declining. The diagnosis is wrong, and the solutions of the corporate reformers are wrong. Our urban schools are in trouble because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation. But public education is not ‘broken.’ Public education is in a crisis only so far as society is and only so far as this new narrative of crisis has destabilized it.”

“Sometimes, the most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds.”

“We will continue to chase rainbows unless we recognize that they are rainbows and there is no pot of gold at the end of them.”

“Privatizing our public schools makes as much sense as privatizing the fire department or or the police department”