Changing My Mind About Schools (and Everything Else)

Speaker 1 And I once heard Bill Gates give a talk to a an audience of teachers, and he gave a speech on the virtues of standardization. And he said, you know, the great thing about standards is if you have a toaster and you plug it in in California and then you fly across the country and you plug it in in New York or Texas or Oregon or Iowa, it works. And it works because there's standardization. And then I kept thinking, children are not toasters and teachers are not toasters. People are different.

Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to the Human Restoration Project Podcast. My name is Nick Covington. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are David Knuffle, Alexander Gruber, and Simeon Frang. Thank you so much for your ongoing support. We're proud to have hosted hundreds of hours of incredible ad free conversation over the years. So if you haven't yet, consider liking and leaving a review in your podcast app to help us reach more listeners. And of course, you can learn more about Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, and connect us on social media. This is a book about my life, about admitting I was wrong, and about how important it is to say it out loud. It's how our guest today, Diane Ravich, begins her 2025 memoir, An Education, How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else. What follows is her incredible life's journey spanning nearly nine decades. From learning to write as a left hander using a Quill pen at her Texas public school to becoming one of the most influential leaders of the modern conservative American education reform movement. Having spent the first half of her professional life in education policy advocating for national standards, testing, and accountability reform alongside charter schools and school choice programs, as a founder of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Assistant Secretary of Education during the George H. W. Bush administration, and serving on the board of the National Assessment for Educational Progress, or NAEP, the gold standard of achievement assessments. However, as the opening quote reveals, after seeing this vision of education reform in action, she very publicly changed her mind about all of it. Diane has now spent the last fifteen years vigorously challenging the same education reform movement she helped build. Co founding the Network for Public Education and writing several bestselling books critical of testing, corporate influence on education policy, and privatization. We must have a more generous contemporary vision of public schools and what they can be, she writes. I will use whatever time I have to fight for the ideals I believe in, to love the people who mean the most to me, and do whatever I can to strengthen democracy in my beloved country and to advance the common good. Diane Ravich, it's a privilege to have you join us today. Oh, hi, Nick. It's great to be with you. So, of course, I I have to ask, you know, you've been writing about education policy for years. Again, we had mentioned dozens of books, before the recording here. So why this book, an education, a memoir, and why now?

Speaker 1 Well, now is the time because getting on up there. I'm 87. My mind is about 37, but my body says, uh-uh. You're older than that, and you don't have too many turns on as the sun goes around. So it it was time. And I've wanted I would say, the past five years, I've been thinking of writing a memoir. And I think that my life is interesting because I've been through so many different phases. Growing up in Texas, being third of eight children, going to an Ivy League college, which was pretty unusual. Nobody else in my school did. I think one other person in my large public high school did. And I I've been through some interesting ups and downs. And I wanted to tell the story. First of all, wanted to tell it because, I don't know, I just felt this need to. And then I thought the question that I've always been asked since 2010 when I wrote a book saying I was wrong is why did you change your mind? So I thought, well, this would be an opportunity to say it, put it in print, and maybe in the future, no one will ask me that question anymore. So that's it.

Speaker 2 It's sort of a a bookend to answer all of any of those previously unanswered questions. This is the final word on them. What I thought was so fascinating, Diane, was that, you know, you spend the first half of the book is really just about your life. And I really enjoyed how your personal life informing your professional views and values and how those changed over the course of your life. And I kept sharing clips of the book with colleagues and just saying, I'm fascinated at everything that you've been involved with along the way here. I'll just share a couple things for listeners. You attended the March on Washington in 1963. You were college friends with Madeleine Albright. You had interactions with basically every US president since JFK, several foreign leaders throwing in there. You were apparently in Poland when the Berlin Wall fell, and I chuckled at this, but you had a heated exchange with science fiction author Isaac Asimov when you were on the board of the New York Public Library over word processing programs back when back when those were coming into the fore. And and I feel like that's just like a fraction of a fraction of all of the interesting stuff that's in here. It kinda felt like Forrest Gump in real life. Right? Like, here here is is every major event of the twentieth century and here's Diane Ravage's connection to it. And I just have to know, like, as you were organizing, right, like, again, almost nine decades, all of this for writing, Did you find a a through line for all of these events or like a north star that that guided you through all of them?

Speaker 1 Well, I wish I could say that there was, but there wasn't. It it was all very happenstance and being there, you know, that's just the that's the book being there. Right? Chauncey Gardner, he was always in these important places. It was a book by, I think, Jersey Kaczynski. In any event, there I was. I was married to a politically engaged person, and he, because of my marriage to him, introduced me to people like Beyer Dresden. And it was because of him that we had dinner at the White House when Lennon Lennon Johnson was president. But it was because of me that I had lunch with Gerald Ford and two other people and, you know, on and on. And I've I met Jimmy Carter a couple of times, but I didn't even mention that. And Reagan, had lunch with, but that wasn't because of my ex husband. That that was just that's where I was.

Speaker 2 You were just in the scene. It just seemed like wherever things were happening, you were there. Like, you worked at the publication, I forget the name of it, that published It's called the new leader. Yeah. The new leader where they published MLK's letter from a Birmingham jail. Yeah. It just you you were blocks away from the assassination of Malcolm x on the hunt for Tiffany lamps in New York City. Isn't that amazing? I just could not believe it. There's even there's even some small things that I just chuckled about. The screening of oh, shoot. What's the movie? Waiting for Superman, Barbara Walters falling on her face. Just just these small recollections.

Speaker 1 How how do you begin to organize, you know, a lifetime of these moments and decide what makes the page or not? Well, I kept thinking about, you know, should I really include that or am I just name dropping? And I thought that it was such a good story. I can't leave it out. I I can't remember if if I mentioned. I think this is one of the ones I left out that when I went on a visit to Yale at one point in my college career, the guy that I met with and and spent the evening chatting with was Terrence McNally. Now a lot of people may not know his name. He's probably the most important playwright of of the past fifty years, and he wrote a lot of very popular shows that were on Broadway. And I didn't I don't think I mentioned that because that felt like name dropping. But I was trying not to name drop, but just to say, you this is something that happened that I saw that I was part of, and there was a lot of stuff like that. The best I could do is say that it's in chronological order.

Speaker 2 Yes. It is. Literally, I think the first sentence is something like, I was born at 12:01AM in Houston, Texas, and then it just takes off from there.

Speaker 1 Yeah. By the way, I was interviewed by a reporter, and I won't say who it was. And after we had a long and I I think not entirely friendly interview, he got back to me the next day and he said, by the way, my editor is gonna want want to know this. When were you born? And I suddenly realized, I don't think he read my book. I think he came to to the interview with a lot of preconceived ideas as he was challenging me. Have you ever changed your mind about anything? Have you changed your mind? So all of these questions could have been asked without reading the book. And since he didn't read the first sentence, I don't think he read the book. Yeah. That that it's literally the first sentence of the first chapter. So

Speaker 2 that's a pretty safe bet, I would say. Is there anything that you, you know, in reflecting, organizing, and planning for the book that you think you've learned about yourself? Like, was there any insight that hit you to be like, oh, man. I hadn't thought about this thing or my life this way before?

Speaker 1 Well, amongst the people who are nearest and dearest to me, they talk about something that happened in the book, which I I was reluctant to write but did, which was that I was, abused by my father. And I had never talked to anyone about that before except, you know, two people and they were sworn not to tell anyone else. So I wrote about this in more detail than either of them knew. And subsequently, always ask, well, how did that affect you? And I I I realized I've never really thought a lot about it. I've never really I I know that it must have affected me, and I think that it probably made me somewhat aloof and less likely to trust people, I think. But I don't know. You know, it's all just a guess. You never know.

Speaker 2 Yeah. That I mean, that was a really shocking, I guess, revelation in the book. And I think from a modern perspective, you know, as someone who who hasn't yet hit 40, I was really shocked too just about like the ambient misogyny that was just suffused throughout, it seems like, your your entire life, which I think even makes the call in your forties to like restart everything from scratch. All that more like audacious at a time when women didn't do that, especially to be with their female partners. So it really story of, you know, those tragic situations too, but and also, you know, your triumph amidst all those mitigating circumstances. Do I guess, do you see it that way too? Just to say, given all the experiences and and tragedies and hardship, like, here you are in 2026.

Speaker 1 Well, I guess, I feel really great about the fact that the way I think of it is most of my people are most people my age already did. So therefore, I feel that's a triumph that I'm here, that I'm talking, that I'm still writing. I have a blog. I write every day on the blog. I usually give give it over to other voices and and just use my blog as a as a platform to help give people a wider audience and in some cases, a narrower audience.

Speaker 2 But I like to think that, as I said, my mind is 37, but my body is definitely not. To kind of talk about your entree into education, you know, like, you talk about how you weren't really into the idea of educating or teaching. And I think if I remember correctly, like, your interest in education starts with attending a Black Panther meeting,

Speaker 1 in New York City in the sixties, and that's Well, it it wasn't exactly it wasn't exactly Black Panthers. Oh, okay. Okay. It was a community meeting in Harlem of black parents who were very angry about a school opening in their neighborhood, and no one asked them their view about what kind of schools do they want. And then when the principal was appointed, nobody said, to the parents, would you form a committee and interview people? They had no input, whatever. So they were very angry, and they wanted community control. It was part of my learning experience just to sit there is the literally is the only white person in the room and to hear their anger and their anguish. And that got me interested. But, you know, I had a number of experiences that pointed me in the direction that I went. One of them being that I I was working as a researcher for the Carnegie Foundation. And so they said, should we invest in this experiment in New York City? The Ford Foundation has asked us to invest in an experiment in decentralization, And we want you to go to the districts where they're trying it out and come back and report to us. So that was one of the reasons why I went to the districts in the city, and there were some something like 30 of them. But three of them, were in rebellion. And so I visited them, met with their leaders, and they would have never met me if I just called and said, hi. I'm I'm looking for a story here. But I called and said, I'm calling from the Carnegie Corporation. And they said, oh, yes. You've gotta come over and see what we're doing, and you've got to meet the leadership. So that was sort of my start. And what what really propelled me was that I decided, you know, this is also interesting. New York City had a two month teacher strike in 1968 and I thought I've been wanting to write. This might be a good subject. I could write an article about the teacher strike. And so I offered it, proposed it as an article to the New York Times Magazine. And the editor there whom I had met socially said to me, well, if you propose know. He says, can't accept this as an article because you don't have any experience. But if you ever come up with an article called I dance with my dentist, that would really interest me. Oh, that made me so angry. It made I knew that it was a total put down. He had no interest in publishing anything I wrote and, that was just pure sexism. So it made me determined to follow that story and write not the article, but I eventually decided that's not an article, that's a book. And that was my first book. That's what really propelled me in education.

Speaker 2 And that was that that the history of the New York City schools then? Is that what that was? Okay. When the book came out, it got a lot of attention.

Speaker 1 And then the only negative attention was people saying, you didn't go to the New York City public schools. How can you write their history? And my response was always, well, people are always writing about the civil war even though they weren't there. I mean, like

Speaker 2 That's kind of that's kind of how history works, guys. I don't know if you're new to this whole thing. You don't have to be there to write about it.

Speaker 1 But that's how that's how I got started.

Speaker 2 That is, I think, an interesting entrance into becoming a policy advocate and then doing the work that you were doing. And it it seems like that starting that work is also sort of the beginning of your personal transformation too. Like, it sort of mirrors these things. Your entry into education and then you stepping out of your marriage in the forties to start your life over again. How did you see, like, the intersection of personal life and the beginnings of your

Speaker 1 professional expertise and education. Well, I guess I've I published my first book in '75. Yeah. And my I I have to say my husband was a very interesting man, a very accomplished guy, very came from a very wealthy family, and he was very interested in politics. So we met a lot of important political figures as a result. And, you know, I I sort of I felt like I had everything. But the one thing I didn't have was, I guess, respect, being able to pursue my career without feeling that I was somehow failing because I wasn't doing the dishes right or I wasn't taking his socks up off the floor. And in 1984, 1985, that's when I said, okay, I'm done with this. I've been married for twenty five years. So I would say I gave it a good shot. And then I met, I met a woman who was a social studies teacher and she was a social studies teacher for thirty years. So she beat you on that.

Speaker 2 Crushed it.

Speaker 1 And that changed my life. And and, you know, she was very encouraging, and she didn't put me down. She didn't expect me to pick up her socks. And we've been together for forty years.

Speaker 2 That's incredible. That's another thing that I wanna talk about too because you you casually slide into the conversation there in the book that, oh, Mary wants to go start this progressive school with Deborah Meyer and New York City and all of those. And meanwhile, you were, like, working at the Brookings. You know, you were really starting, like, you know, your conservative education reform, the nucleus of that in the in the late eighties, early nineties. How did you bridge that gap? Here's Barry going off to

Speaker 1 Deb to Debbie Meyer's school, and here's you at Brookings. How does that work at home? You know? Well, you know, it worked fine. We didn't we didn't clash over education issues. We had a great life. We went traveled a lot and saw a lot of, you know, Japan and Europe and India and so forth. So we we were having a really engaging, interesting, fun life together. And then I had become friendly before we went to Washington. I had become friendly with Deborah Meyer. And I tell the story in the book about how he or she was the kind of the leader of the progressive movement in New York City and really in some ways in the nation. And she had reviewed one of my books in 1983 and she just excoriated me. And she put me down every way possible. And I was also friendly with Albert Shanker, is the head of the teachers union, which is now the it's the AFT. And I said to Al, I said, I don't get this Deborah Meyer. She really, really doesn't like me, and I just don't understand why she's so down on me. And and he said, well, why don't you talk to her? I think you'd like her. I said, oh, that's an interesting idea. So the next day I picked up the phone and called her school. And she was still running a school called Central Park East, which was like a a very notable progressive school and kind of doing her thing, in terms of meeting children where they were, making sure they were engaged and interested and enjoying. And, you know, she didn't she hates standardized testing, all of those things that, I was on the other side of. So I called her one day and I said, Deborah, hi, this is Diane Ravage. And I hear a gasp at the other end of the line. And I said, I I said, you know my work. I'd like to see your work. Can I come and visit you? So there was a long pause and she said, well, of course. So I went up a day or two later to her school on 104th Street in East Harlem. And we spent a couple of hours talking. And since then, we've been fast friends. So, you know, she was she was part of my change of views as well because she and I blogged together at, education week, which was then the really the premier education publication. And one week, I would write a letter to her, and the next week she would respond to me. And we kept this going back and forth for, like, I don't know, seven years. So I I like to say, well, Deborah, my my great change of view from conservative to liberal, it's all because of you. I'm blaming it on you. So she loved that. That's incredible. What a great story. And it's just, I think it harkens back to an era where education

Speaker 2 didn't seem so partisan. Obviously, were sides of things, but could you imagine having that today? You know, conversations with Fordham and, I don't know what the what the equivalent of of Deborah Meyer's school would be today. But, right, I just don't see those same kinds of cross pollination happening because obviously it had a huge impact in your life and we can see how that exchange of ideas can be so powerful.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I think I think that everything, including education, has become very, conflict ridden. And, people go to the barricades. I mean, like the book banning that's going on now, and I know it's happening in Iowa as it is in so many other states where, people are coming in and saying, well, you can't you can't have that book in the library. And you know, someone might say it and it's inappropriate for them and librarian might say, but no one's checked that book out in two years. Well, you can't have it, take it out and get rid of this one and get rid of that one. Then if you were to ask them, well, what is it exactly you object to? And they'll look at their notes and they'll say, well, says here now they haven't read the book. Of course not. The people who wanna ban books ought ought to have to take a test and say, yes, I did read the book and this is what I objected to. And, okay, we'll put this in the 16 and over category.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Exactly. On the other hand, I can remember, there was like a book banning incident at the school district that I was working at that led us to have to fill out paperwork for the school board if we wanted to teach a new book. And one of the requirements for adding a new book was listing any potentially objectionable content, which, you know, if you take anything, any book out of context and just list the parts that may be potentially objectionable, you know, no school board is gonna go to bat to add new books. And lo and behold, the whole time, you know, I was I was there, we weren't able to add any, you know, new, novels or nonfiction or anything else to the to the curriculum formally because of that. Well, Nick, you you may not know this, but years ago, I'm talking about 2006,

Speaker 1 I published a book called The Language Police, which is a book about the history of censorship. And it goes back to the beginning of of basically in this country, public education where someone would say, well, you can't teach that. Well, it's in a Shakespeare play. No. You can't teach that anyway. So there were people who went through Shakespeare's plays that were taught in school and would delete whole sections of them because it say, well, children shouldn't be exposed to that. But there were also lots of other books, throughout the nineteenth century and and the twentieth century where someone said you have to cut that out. And so when they would get, when stories would get reproduced in anthologies, they would eliminate anything that anyone found objectionable. You know, part of the language police was just saying, we're doing this now with textbooks. And so I had a list of 800 words that you'll never see in a textbook. You might find it amusing. Take a look at it. It's funny. Today, the word landlord would be unacceptable because it's sexist. If you show, you can show elderly people, but you can't show them with a cane or sitting in a rocking chair because that's ageist. And so there are all these things you're not allowed to show or say or write because somebody is going to be somebody somewhere is going to be offended. There are there's just a long, long list of forbidden topics. And then I found that all the publishers were using these lists. And I got I got copies of the list from publishers, all the big education publishers. They were they're called bias sensitivity guidelines.

Speaker 2 I think today, those movements that if that sentiment has always been there, it feels like those movements today are really supercharged by new tools and technologies. You know, it could just be someone posting on social media. They found this in their kid's book that they brought home, you know. And absent any kind of context that gets picked up by, I don't know, mainstream media or the president of The United States, and now, you know, the district gets bomb threats because they had this line in a book in their library. Just an escalation of all those tenants. It's really gotten out of control.

Speaker 1 The Internet is largely responsible for that because if, as you say, somebody might hear about something and then it gets magnified over and over again. And then there are people who've actually read the contested books and they make a list and they'll say, well, on page 22, the book says this and then on page 29, it says that. And and so they'll have these like clip sheets of what's objectionable without it. And everyone else who sees their work just takes it on their word that this is a bad book. But you know, I have to say, and I'll be honest about this. I wish someone would ban my book. Mhmm. It does wonders for sales.

Speaker 2 I'll go to the school board. I'll go to bat for you, Diane. Oh, thank you. Get these books out of here.

Speaker 1 Well, I was I was at a museum the other day in New York City called the Morgan Library, and they have a wonderful bookstore of you know, that's where you find great stuff is at museum bookstores. They had a book called Baby's First Book of Banned Books.

Speaker 2 So, like, a is for whatever, b is f is for Fahrenheit four fifty one. Okay. Etcetera etcetera. That's amazing.

Speaker 1 You can't you can't start censoring too too early.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Exactly. To kinda bring things back to, I guess, ed reform, which I don't even I don't even know what what you would call it today. But like back in the nineties and two thousands through the twenty tens, there was like sort of a coherent idea about education reform being, you know, a set of standards, whether they're national or otherwise, and being accountable to those through testing parental choice, through charters, vouchers, and these other kinds of things. Those sort of became the bedrock, you know, of what became the education reform movement so called. And, you know, what kind of led you in that that direction in in those values, initially, you know, in your work?

Speaker 1 Well, I became a supporter of school choice in the when I was working in the George h w Bush administration. I'm a graduate and a product of public education. So I never had bad feelings about it because I've been fed from it. You know, I didn't think it was bad. But then, it became kind of an end thing to go around and say, our schools are failing. The Reagan administration produced a pamphlet called A Nation at Risk, and they said our schools are failing. We're mediocre. Kids don't take their schooling seriously, blah blah blah. And so I was kind of echoing that line. And then that was part of the reason I think I was chosen to join the George h w Bush administration. And we were pushing for standards and we wanted a national test, but it was illegal to have a national test. So we were promoting standards, and we were also promoting the idea that, accountability. Very important to have accountability for schools, for teachers. And then along then came George h w Bush. And I have to say, president Clinton echoed the same line. He came between the two Bushes, and he was in favor of national standards and national tests. And his views were really not very different from George h w Bush or even George w Bush. There was a lot of continuity from a nation at risk all the way through to, I would say, through the end of the Obama term. And they were all promoting the same vision, was the thing that will make schools successful and everyone will get a high test scores is if you test, test, test, and you show them here's how you take the test, here's how you succeed at the test, here's what we expect of you. And then if they don't get the test score, you punish their school, maybe even close their school, punish their teacher, give the teacher an evaluation and a rating saying your scores didn't go up. You're going to be fired. And then you start firing teachers. So you really crack down. You crack down on teachers. You crack down on schools. You make it very punitive unless you get those high scores. And then here we are. Nation at Risk came out in during Reagan's term, 1983. And so here we are in its ninth and it's 2026. Mhmm. And we have had really nonstop testing, testing, testing, standards, testing, choice. And all it's done really is to to take money away from public schools and to create schools that are more segregated than ever, meaning private schools. Church schools are indoctrinating kids into their religion. The charter schools have not been any better than regular public schools and they take money away from regular public schools. I am a strong I mean, has been the big change in my life. I went through a period of being a supporter of standards testing and accountability and choice. And as I saw the results come in and I realized that achievement gap is built into standardized testing, we will never close the achievement gaps. When people talk about we've got to close the achievement gap and we have to test more. No. The nature of standardized testing is that the achievement gap is going to be based on a normed test. A normed test means that you've got a bottom and a top and they never ever close. So it's designed. The standardized tests are designed on a norm that never closes. You will always have an achievement gap. There will always be a top and a bottom. What really changed my view of the world and of education was to realize that it's the rich kids who are always at the top and the poor kids are always at the bottom. And if you don't do something to remediate and improve the lives of the kids at the bottom, nothing will ever change. That all that testing was enriching the testing companies and diverting money from teachers and from the things that schools need like capital repairs and doing nothing to help children. What I mean, if children don't have medical care, if they don't have a roof over their head, if they don't have a nutritious meals at least once, twice or three times a day, they're not going to do well in school. If they're sick because they don't have medical care, you know, they have all the negative impacts, social influences and they don't do well at school. That should not be a surprise. And so sure you can a journalist can say, I found a poor kid who got high test scores. Great. That's not true though of poor kids. Poor kids get the lowest scores. And it is as sure as the sun comes up in the morning and goes down at night that rich kids have the scores at the top and poor kids have the scores at the bottom. And that had a huge impact on me because all that testing was not helping poor kids. In the same sense, choice is not helping poor kids. It's actually making things worse. It's it is endangering and destroying the public school system by making schooling more segregated, by having all these publicly funded private schools that don't accept the kids that they don't want. I mean, that's a great hidden secret of school choice is it's the schools choose. And the schools choose the kids that are easiest to educate and leave the toughest cases for public schools.

Speaker 2 Everything that you're speaking to seems to point to, you know, from 1983, clear through No Child Left Behind, and then seeing the fruits of that whole movement, those two decades really come to pass in the early two thousands. You think of that period of early implementation, you know, between that time and the early two thousands and sort of when you had your break in 2010, you seem to be responding to

Speaker 1 the evidence is here. I was responding I was responding to reality. And, you know, what was most disappointing for me is I'm not I was not being partisan. This is not just George h w Bush or George Bush. It's also Clinton and Obama. And Obama's program was in a continuation of No Child Left Behind. Obama's program was called Race to the Top. It was really a horrible program because it was initiated at the time we had this big depress recession that were not quite a depression. But the big recession was 2008, and then Obama's elected then and he brings in Arne Duncan. And congress says, we're gonna have to end the recession by putting out lots of money and reviving the economy. And Arne Duncan was given a $100,000,000,000 to reform the schools. And Arne Duncan was part and parcel of this so called reform movement. I call it the corporate reform movement. And it's a corporate reform movement because it really actually has no public support. There are no groups of parents except the ones who are paid who are supporting high stakes testing and school choice. I mean, there's lots of choice in the public schools as they exist. I mean, maybe even too much choice, but the public schools offered lots of choice and they've been bogged down by this whole approach of testing and testing and testing and then punishing people, punishing teachers, firing teachers, closing schools. And Arne Duncan, Obama's secretary of education, was a great advocate of closing schools and firing teachers if their scores didn't go up. And that's no way to build a school system. That's no way to educate children. It's very punitive and and basically a failed approach to education.

Speaker 2 And I'm so curious then. What what do you think is the divide between education policies that work, right, that we understand, whether they're like social policies that give kids eyeglasses, for example. I've I've read a study that kids in Baltimore who got eyeglasses saw, you know, huge test score gains. You don't have to change anything about school choice or classroom pedagogy or whatever. Just give kids glasses who need glasses, for example. But, like, why are the sort of zombie policies, the ones that the unsinkable rubber ducks I'll just keep mixing my metaphors here. But why are these the ones that soak up all of our time and attention on school choice and testing and accountability when, like you've said, we're on like year 30 of these ideas that clearly don't they don't work to do the things that they claim to do. And if they did, we would have ample evidence of that right now, But we don't. But they don't go away. Why don't they go away, Diane? Why can't we get new ideas? It's a very, very,

Speaker 1 simple explanation. It's called the the money. And I mean, that my the first book that you read where I changed my mind was called the the death and life of the great American school system, how testing and choice are undermining education. And what I I had a chapter on that book called the billionaire boys club where I showed that the big foundations in particular, the Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation of Arkansas, and also the Broad Foundation, which I don't know if it still exists, but it it the billionaire there was Eli Broad, a billionaire in in Los Angeles. And the three of them were putting hundreds of millions of dollars into more testing, more choice, and more accountability. And the more punitive, the better. And Gates honestly believed I'm not saying these are bad people. They honestly believed, and it was rather technocratic. If they just applied this medicine, then the schools would all produce kids who got a 100 and there wouldn't be any kids left behind. No child left behind, which is a ridiculous idea because if you've been a teacher as you have been, if you've been a parent, if you've observed how kids learn, there's never going to be a class where everybody gets a 100 unless you have a highly gifted school and you've weeded out everybody except the kids who get a 100. So if you if you choose carefully, you can get that kind of a class, but you'll never get a random assignment class where everybody is learning at the same pace. So Obama through Arne Duncan and through the bill through Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation promoted something called Common Core, which I'm sure you're familiar with. And the Common Core was based on the assumption that if everybody had the same textbooks and everybody had the same standards and everybody had tests based on those standards and every teacher learned the standards and taught the standards, that everybody would come out with exactly the same grades. Nobody would left be left behind because they've all learned the same thing in the same way, blah blah blah. And I once heard Bill Gates give a talk to an audience of teachers and he gave a speech on the virtues of standardization. And he said, you know, the great thing about standards is if you have a toaster and you plug it in in California and then you fly across the country and you plug it in in New York or Texas or Oregon or Iowa, it works. And it works because there's standardization. And then I kept thinking, but children are not toasters and teachers are not toasters. People are different and kids learn in different ways. They're interested in different things. Teachers have different teaching styles that work for some kids, don't work for others. And standardization is not the answer to whatever the issues are. But he was a great enthusiast for his standardization. I know that Broad is no longer engaged in education policy, but between the three of them, they put a lot of money and that money is now involving many more than those three billionaires. I wrote a book a couple of years ago called Slaying Goliath in which I did, among other things, not only was I celebrating the people who stood up and said, you're not taking my public school away, but I made a list of the billionaires. All the billionaires I could find who were supporting this version of corporate reform, which was very punitive. It's a very long list. It's like every billionaire in the country with very few exceptions is pouring money into privatizing our schools. In privatization, if there's one policy that we know has failed, it's privatization. Because when you give public money to private schools, the first thing is, well, they don't have to be tested because they're not public. And the religious schools, they don't have to be tested because they're not public. So you actually create an incentive for kids to leave public school and go to a school where they're not gonna be tested and where the results won't be reported. And so you have a a state like Florida. They have, vouchers for everybody who wants them. Well, don't you know that most of the vouchers are going to kids who never attended a public school? So they're they're they're subsidizing the kids who are already in private school, the kids who are already in religious schools. And in every state, this is the case. Every state with vouchers that had that has universal vouchers and there are more and more of them. I know that Arizona, Ohio, New Hampshire, Florida, and I think Texas, and there are a few others. Anyone who wants a voucher can have it. So your income may be $600,000 a year. That's okay. You're entitled to a voucher for each of your children. It may be worth $10,000 each, but at some point the public is not going to just keep upping money for education or they don't up it at all. And there's less and less for public schools. Public schools end up getting the kids who the private schools don't want. And that's terrible. It's a terrible, especially because our society is already so riven with divisions. The public school was the one place that brought us all together. And now these billionaires who, don't want to pay taxes to pay for schools, they are they are dividing us up into more and more segregated pods when when so the children go to school with kids who are just like them.

Speaker 2 I think if we could say pretty confidently that privatization and I guess, like, the the morass of ideas sort of around feeding into that is probably the biggest concern. I mean, you've you've written about it. I know Josh Cowan has written a book about it through vouchers. And, obviously, we've we've talked about Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider's work, Education Wars and Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door. I just I think there's been a lot of focus on, like, this as the key, grounding concern of of this age. I guess, to turn that on its head, is there anything, like, positive? Is there a trend in education right now? Like, look thinking of the scope of your your interest in your life here that gives you a sense of hope or a good of goodness. Is there something good happening that we can say, you know, there's hope for a better future in education because of this?

Speaker 1 Well, you know, when I wrote Slaying Goliath, it it was my intention was to give hope to people and to spotlight people who have fought back against the voucher crowd and won, who have fought to maintain their public schools. And they're they're fighting this this massively funded, group of organizations that claim to be grassroots, but but they're all paid. What gives me hope right now, the last story that gives me hope and then every day it might be something different. Right now, it's that I read a story in education week about a school in Connecticut, an elementary school, that decided to bring back play. So instead of, you know, we've been pushing the academics down to the point where even pre k is expected to read, which is ridiculous. It's they should be playing. Kindergarten kids should be playing. And what the teachers there have been doing is that they they learn from each other how to use play as a way of teaching what the standards say you're supposed to teach. And they're very successful on the standards. They're they're like the number one rated school in the state right now. And everything that they teach is done through a play based approach. And I thought, wow, isn't that great? The only thing that's bad is that you have to judge play by test scores, which is ridiculous. But the kid the kids are learning science by building toys and measuring things that to build the toys. They're learning math. They're learning science. They're learning how things work, taking things apart, putting them together, going out into the nature and learning about the biology of of plants and and little critters. You know, play is very engaging. Kids are motivated. And the one thing that you can't say about tests is that kids are motivated because it's just like a punitive thing to say, and you get the right answer to this stupid question. Now read this passage, comes from a book that you never read, and answer, you know, it's maybe a question about, I don't know, butterflies or World War one or whatever, but it's all out of context. And read this snippet and pick the right answer. And one of the reasons that I turned against standardized testing was that I spent seven years on the the national testing board. National testing board is called the national NAGB, National Assessment Governing Board, and it produces something called NAEP. NAEP is the the the federal test that kids take every other year for reading and math and sometimes for other subjects. And by now, the Trump administration may have actually wiped out the funding for NAEP, so I don't know if it'll continue. But people like to point to NAEP and they say, look, our test scores haven't gone up. This is terrible. We're failing, failing, Well, the test scores did go up. They went up substantially during the period in which we were integrating schools. They went they went up in response to spending more money on preschool education, but they've been essentially flat ever since we started this so called reform movement where it's all test, test, test. So I think there's something to be said for sampling, but I don't like the idea of giving kids tests and then say, you failed. You failed again. You failed last year. You failed again. You at some point, the kids lose all motivation because they're they're never gonna get given the nature of the standardized tests, there's always gotta be a bottom half. And if you're always in the bottom half, at a certain point, you lose all motivation. And when I learned as a member of the NAGB board, I'd I'd review questions and I'd say, well, this question is idiotic. No. It's going to be on the test. Or I'd look at the answers and I'd say, I don't I don't understand. Two of the answers are are correct. I could make a case. There are four answers here. Two of them are clearly wrong. Two of them, either one conceivably could be the right answer. And, you know, that's okay. That it's like tricking kids by putting a tricky a tricky right answer and a and a real right answer. Because It's just not the way to to learn. It's not the way to motivate kids. Without motivation, I guess John Dewey said it first, interest will get you there faster than effort. Interest and effort are both important, but if you don't have interest,

Speaker 2 you're not gonna have effort. Yeah. I think especially for kids for whom, you know, they're gonna take four fifty question tests a day for a week to see how much they're learning at a certain point, the answer becomes e, who cares? You know? I'm just gonna fill in the bubbles so I can get done with this as soon as possible. But the test can't discriminate between a kid who gets the answer wrong because they just guessed and or got it right because they guessed because they didn't care, and a kid who actually knows prescribes its interventions accordingly. And it's it's so interesting that, you know, we come full circle back to play when I kind of see that as a that's like a basic human need. That's like saying kids learn better when they have eaten healthy food or when they breathe clean air. Yeah. When they have so so that's that to me is like that's like the play is the floor. That's not the that's not the ceiling. That's not the new hotness. That's not an intervention. That's we gotta provide that alongside,

Speaker 1 you know, safe, clean learning environments and everything else that we would expect. But, you know, just to go to Iowa for a moment, I can remember years ago, Iowa used to be held up as the gold standard of education. And, you know, the the test that kids would take would be the Iowa test of basic Yep.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 1 kids all over the country took that test, but they took the test and the teachers who taught them would know the answer on the same day or the next day. Now with standardized tests today, the tests are designed somewhere, god knows where, you know, maybe they're designed in California or Massachusetts or wherever, Virginia. And the kids are given the test and the tests are sent away and they're scored. And the kids take the test in March and the answers come back to a teacher in September. Now it's not the same teacher that the child had in March. It's a different teacher. And when the teacher gets the answer, she doesn't know how the student answered each question. She just gets a score or he just gets a score. And that means that the teacher has nothing to tell the parents or the kid about what they need to improve. All they can say is you're at the bottom or you're in the top 90 percentile or you're on the bottom 10 percentile. And I I compare this to going to a doctor and he examined you and you say, oh, I've got this terrible pain in my stomach. And he says, alright. I've examined you. I'll I'll get back to you in six months. And he gets back to in six months. And of course, the pain isn't there anymore. It may be somewhere else. And he says, you know, I've discovered that you're in the top 10 percentile for people your age. Oh, okay. But what medicine should I take? Well, said that's I don't really know because I don't know. I don't know the answers to any particular questions. And I can recall when the standardized testing for common core first started. At some point on my blog, I was publishing questions because I was sent them by a teacher. I got a call from a testing company saying we're going to sue you if you don't take those questions off your blog. Those questions are proprietary. They belong to the testing company. And I said, well, how are kids supposed to learn what they are? How are teachers supposed to learn if they don't know where kids' weaknesses are? And they said that's none of our business. None of your business. Don't publish any questions. So the teachers are not allowed to see the answers to the questions. They were not allowed to discuss them or to write about them. That means nobody knows what was tested and nobody knows what the answers were. They just know the score. How does that help anybody?

Speaker 2 And at the same time, every single move that we've made under that corporate education reform paradigm, clear through race to the top and and the common core was designed to give those companies more money because we put dollars into the testing and evaluation and development of these things. And I think now we sort of see that on the curriculum side, right, where now to be able to teach reading in a particular way or to teach math in a particular way, you don't train teachers and you don't, you know, value experience and expertise, you buy a box. You buy you buy this box curriculum and expect everyone to stick to the the letter and the page number and everything else as you go. And you're teaching a curriculum.

Speaker 1 You're not teaching children per se. Right. You know? Right. Well, I I am very much opposed to mandating to legislators mandating how to teach because they can't teach. So why should they tell you how to teach? And they're doing it all over the country. Not that they're mandating the science of reading and it's too long to get into in this show. But I know the history of the science of reading and there will come a time ten years from now when we'll look back and say, well, why did we do that? Because that's been the history of reading since the eighteen forties. We have gone back and forth. Exactly. Pendulum swing from we need phonics. We don't need phonics. We need phonics. We don't need back and forth. And the truth is, yeah, we do need phonics, but there are many different ways to teach it. And, it shouldn't be the only thing that kids learn because back in No Child Left Behind, which would have been 2001 to 2007 or so, there was an evaluation. They they actually applied the science of reading and they spent six billion dollars in federal funds testing the science of reading. And the evaluation showed that kids were better at phonics, but they didn't comprehend any better. So what was the good of that? What's the point? If you could say, I can sound out cat, but I don't understand the sentence. I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 Hey. Their their their phonics scores went up though. So I think success.

Speaker 1 Oh, you know, it's it's important to to understand that that everybody learns differently. Teachers teach differently. Teachers have to be very well prepared, and they don't need to be constantly monitored by the federal or the state government. And they don't need to be judged by test scores either because if you bear in mind, that's one fundamental fact. The rich kids get the highest scores and the poor kids get the lowest scores. And the thing that the state can do is make sure that the kids are well fed, have access to medical care, and have the social services that their families need, which is why I've become a great proponent of community schools. Community schools are schools that are not just, you know, eight thirty to three and the doors are locked, but rather they're after school hours are used to give kids extra services, extra tutoring, and they also encourage families to come in and can connect them with social services that are available, but they don't know about. So, you know, and have a food pantry and have, clothes in case kids don't have a winter coat, and they can get a winter coat. So all these things make sense, but we don't do them. Instead, what under this Trump administration, it's all about privatization. It's all about homeschooling and, charter schools and vouchers in religious schools. And if it's up to president Trump who doesn't belong to a church so far as I know, everyone would be religious school. The

Speaker 2 irony. Yeah. Diane, as as our time kinda comes to a close here, you know, there's not every 87 year old has just published a book and then comes on a podcast to talk about it. So I just have to know, you know, you have this long career of advocacy, critique, critical reflection, introspection. You've said multiple times, you know, you feel like a 30 year old in an eighty eighty something's body. Where are you focusing your energy and your your hope and and your attention now?

Speaker 1 Well, I have to say that I am obsessed with the destruction of our democracy that's happening every day. I'm very upset that, the Department of Health and Human Services has decided to cut back on the vaccines given to children. Children will die, and we don't need to have more testing to find out that children will die. We already know that. We have lots of experience. I'm very upset that the Department of Justice has been turned into a political arm of the White House because we needed an independent and strong Department of Justice. I'm upset with all the people who've been laid off, who in most cases were senior people with decades of experience. And I think that, you know, when I think about what Elon Musk did with his doge group, just going through and and cutting off foreign aid and knowing that hundreds of thousands of children would die and families. And I just I wanna see a better America. I wanna see the America that I grew up dreaming about. I wanna see the America of my childhood, which was the good country. We were the good country and the great country, and people wanted to come here because we were good and great. And now we're just mean and cruel. I'm so happy with every time I see a story about people standing up and saying, these people are our neighbors. You can't take them away. I'm very upset every time I see somebody in with an ice uniform on mask and no badge and an unmarked car grabbing people off the street. This is not America. So my energy and my passion comes from my passion to see our country become what it what it's supposed to be, which is good. And it we're it's good people and we need to reassert our good values. Well, thank you so much, Diane. This has been such a a pleasure and a privilege to talk with you today. Well, thank you, Nick. It's been wonderful to talk with you, and I encourage you to continue doing all the great things you're doing.

Speaker 3 Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player. Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org. Thank you.