Diane Ravitch’s memoir is a moving chronicle of intellectual courage and deep care for public education. Once a leading conservative voice advocating testing, standards, charters, and vouchers, she had the humility to acknowledge when her beliefs failed in practice, recognizing that poverty—not “bad teachers” or “failing schools”—was the real crisis. With honesty and grace, Diane retraces her journey from her Houston childhood to her service in the government, including a stint in the conservative Department of Education, and her eventual transformation into one of our fiercest defenders of public schools. Blending personal reflection with a historian’s rigor, Diane explains how she came to embrace equity, professional teachers, and democratic public education, becoming an inspiring activist whose life’s work continues to uplift the promise of our public schools.
You can purchase An Education on Amazon, or if you prefer, directly from Columbia University Press.
To watch this video, click here.
$853,630,449.00
That is the staggering price tag of fraud, theft, financial mismanagement, and illegal related-party deals uncovered in charter schools, based on 36 news investigations and state audits published over just the past two years.
Read in this great investigative report by Quinlan Bently and Bebe Hodges of the Cincinnati Enquirer how for-profit charter operator and Dohn Community High School charter school Supe Ramone Davenport ran a network of violent nightclubs while funneling millions in taxpayer funds from his charter school through inflated enrollment, related-party deals, and unauthorized contracts, leaving the school insolvent. His actions led to Dohn’s abrupt closure in March 2025, displacing at-risk students with three days’ notice. Watch and share our summary by clicking the video above.
(from Diane’s blog)
“David was one of the most honored research psychologists in the nation… I want to praise him as a wise and insightful friend. I learned from him and was very happy that we forged a strong bond in the past few years…
David was an acerbic critic of the past two+ decades of what was called “education reform.” … David had no patience with the shallow critics of America’s public schools. He respected the nation’s teachers and understood, as few of the critics did, just how valuable and under-appreciated they were.”
David left us a gift—essays published just this month. You can find them here.