Diane Ravitch famous quotes

06-13-2025

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

#School #Ideas #Long
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

#Children #School #Curriculum
What should we think of someone who never admits error, never entertains doubt but adheres unflinchingly to the same ideas all his life, regardless of new evidence? Doubt and skepticism are signs of rationality. When we are too certain of our opinions, we run the risk of ignoring any evidence that conflicts with our views. It is doubt that shows we are still thinking, still willing to reexamine hardened beliefs when confronted with new facts and new evidence.
-- Diane Ravitch

#Running #Thinking #Ideas
Can teachers successfully educate children to think for themselves if teachers are not treated as professionals who think for themselves?
-- Diane Ravitch

#Teacher #Children #Thinking
American education has been littered with failed fads and foolish ideas for the past century.
-- Diane Ravitch

#Past #Ideas #Fads
Unless the schools provide our children with a vision of human possibility that enlightens and empowers them with knowledge and taste, they will simply play their role in someone else's marketing schemes. Unless they understand deeply the sources of our democracy, they will take it for granted and fail to exercise their rights and responsibilities.
-- Diane Ravitch

#Children #Responsibility #School
Privatizing our public schools makes as much sense as privatizing the fire department or or the police department
-- Diane Ravitch

#School #Fire #Police
Testing children until they cry is a bad idea. It is an educational malpractice.
-- Diane Ravitch

#Children #Educational #Ideas
Sometimes the most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds.
-- Diane Ravitch

#Intelligent #Shining #Mind
Congress and state legislatures should not tell teachers how to teach, any more than they should tell surgeons how to perform operations.
-- Diane Ravitch

#Teacher #Legislature #States
One of the persistent ironies of reform is the impossibility of predicting the full consequences of change ...
-- Diane Ravitch

#Change #Reform #Irony
If charter schools are not more successful on average than the public schools they replace, what is accomplished by demolishing public education? What is the rationale for authorizing for-profit charters or charter management organizations with high-paid executives, since their profits and high salaries are paid by taxpayers' dollars?
-- Diane Ravitch

#School #Successful #Organization
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

#Wise #Book #Decision
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

#Teacher #Hurt #Children
Research does not support any part of Race to the Top
-- Diane Ravitch

#Race #Support #Doe
The greatest obstacle to those who hope to reform American education is complacency.
-- Diane Ravitch

#Reform #Complacency #Obstacles
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

#Civilization #Taught #Students
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

#Rainbow #Gold #Pot
Accountability makes no sense when it undermines the larger goals of education.
-- Diane Ravitch

#Goal #Accountability
Those who canâ€™t teach, pass laws about how to evaluate teachers.
-- Diane Ravitch

#Teacher #Law #Teach
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

#School #Gutters #Ladders
When you succeed at keeping almost everyone in school, you must figure out ways to educate everyone you keep in school.
-- Diane Ravitch

#School #Way #Succeed
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

#Teacher #School #Foundation
You can't lead your troops if your troops do not trust you.
-- Diane Ravitch

#Troops #Our Troops
Teachers' working conditions are students' learning conditions
-- Diane Ravitch

#Teacher #Teaching #Students
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

#Decision #Understanding #Passive
There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society's wealthiest people; when the wealthiest of these foundations are joined in common purpose, they represent an unusually powerful force that is beyond the reach of democratic institutions.
-- Diane Ravitch

#Running #Powerful #People
Going to school is not the same as going shopping. Parents should not be burdened with locating a suitable school for their child. They should be able to take their child to the neighborhood public school as a matter of course and expect that it has well-educated teachers and a sound educational program.
-- Diane Ravitch

#Teacher #Children #Educational

You may also like:

Albert Shanker
Alfie Kohn
Author
Arne Duncan
United States Secretary of Education
Clarence Thomas
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
David Souter
Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Deborah Meier
Education Reform Leader
E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
Eli Broad
Business person
Geoffrey Canada
Social activist
George H. W. Bush
41st U.S. President
Joel Klein
Lawyer
Jonathan Kozol
Writer
Karen Lewis
Teacher
Lamar Alexander
United States Senator
Linda Darling-Hammond
Professor
Michael Mulgrew
Teacher
Michelle Rhee
Educator
Paul Tough
Writer
Randi Weingarten
Attorney
Wendy Kopp