Diane Ravitch on decades of school reform

Chalkbeat Ideas is a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up for the Ideas newsletter to follow our work. For much of the last several decades, Diane Ravitch has had the ear of powerful people. As a college student at Wellesley in 1958 Diane Ravitch spent two hours in a class seminar talking with then-Sen. John F. Kennedy before later working on his campaign for president. A few decades later, after she had become a conservative intellectual — championing academic standards, testing, and school choice, while opposing busing for integration — presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan sought her advice. She stayed in the Arkansas governor’s mansion with Bill and Hillary Clinton and then served in the George H. W. Bush administration. A longtime New York City resident, Ravitch declined an offer from then Mayor Rudy Giuliani to run the city’s schools, she says. Later she entertained the next mayor, Michael Bloomberg, in her home,