Diane Ravitch Quotes

#1. Can teachers successfully educate children to think for themselves if teachers are not treated as professionals who think for themselves?

Diane Ravitch

#2. When you realize that your history books and your science books and your literature books are not the result of experts sitting down and making it a wise decision, but of political pressure groups coming to the state textbook hearings, this is wrong.

Diane Ravitch

#3. Most people believe that schools were good enough when they were children and that they are good enough now. But the dynamic growth of our system of education has spawned serious problems of educational quality.

Diane Ravitch

#4. The foundations demand that public schools and teachers be held accountable for performance, but they themselves are accountable to no one. If their plans fail, no sanctions are levied against them. They are bastions of unaccountability.

Diane Ravitch

#5. 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.

Diane Ravitch

#6. Privatizing our public schools makes as much sense as privatizing the fire department or or the police department

Diane Ravitch

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

Diane Ravitch

#8. Without knowledge and understanding, one tends to become a passive spectator rather than an active participant in the great decisions of our time.

Diane Ravitch

#9. What is happening to teachers now across this nation is a disgrace. The attacks on them are a blot on our nation. Teachers and students are not different interest groups. Anyone who demeans teachers demeans education and hurts children.

Diane Ravitch

#10. Testing children until they cry is a bad idea. It is an educational malpractice.

Diane Ravitch

#11. 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?

Diane Ravitch

#12. Of course, all students should learn African history, as they should learn the history of other continents and major civilizations. But this history should be taught accurately and based on the best scholarship, not ideology or politics.

Diane Ravitch

#13. Testing is not a substitute for curriculum and instruction. Good education cannot be achieved by a strategy of testing children, shaming educators, and closing schools.

Diane Ravitch

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

Diane Ravitch

#15. The ladder was there, from the gutter to the university, and for those stalwart enough to ascend it, the schools were a boon and a path out of poverty.

Diane Ravitch

#16. Nations such as Finland, Canada, Japan, and South Korea spend time and resources improving the skills of their teachers, not selectively firing them in relation to student test scores.

Diane Ravitch

#17. Social scientists generally agree that students' families (especially family income, which determines advantages and opportunity) have an even bigger impact on student performance than their school or teachers.

Diane Ravitch

#18. One of the persistent ironies of reform is the impossibility of predicting the full consequences of change ...

Diane Ravitch

#19. Accountability makes no sense when it undermines the larger goals of education.

Diane Ravitch

#20. Teachers' working conditions are students' learning conditions

Diane Ravitch

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

Diane Ravitch

#22. When you succeed at keeping almost everyone in school, you must figure out ways to educate everyone you keep in school.

Diane Ravitch

#23. An attack on Public Education is an attack on Democracy

Diane Ravitch

#24. The greatest obstacle to those who hope to reform American education is complacency.

Diane Ravitch

#25. You can't lead your troops if your troops do not trust you.

Diane Ravitch

#26. It defies reason to believe that Martin Luther King, Jr. would march arm in arm with Wall Street hedge fund managers and members of ALEC to lead a struggle for the privatization of public education, the crippling of unions, and the establishment of for-profit schools.

Diane Ravitch

#27. We should totally ban for-profit charters. For-profit's first obligation is to its stockholders, not to its children.

Diane Ravitch

#28. Research does not support any part of Race to the Top

Diane Ravitch

#29. What matters most is for the school, the district, and the state to be able to say that more students have reached "proficiency." This sort of fraud ignores the students' interests while promoting the interests of adults who take credit for nonexistent improvements.

Diane Ravitch

#30. Those who can't teach, pass laws about how to evaluate teachers.

Diane Ravitch