About-face: A Conservative Rethinks Education Policy

It's fall 2007. Diane Ravitch is packing a career's worth of reading and writing on public schooling in America into boxes: the time had come to repaint her Brooklyn home office, to reconsider the previous fifteen years she'd spent championing market-based reforms in education, and to sink into a full-blown intellectual crisis. I was aware that I had undergone a wrenching transformation in my perspective on school reform. Where once I had been hopeful, even enthusiastic, about the potential benefits of testing, accountability, choice, and markets, I now found myself experiencing profound skepticism about these same ideas….I was trying to see my way through the blinding assumptions of ideology and politics, including my own.