Diane Ravitch

Diane Ravitch "is senior research scholar at New York University, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. She served as assistant secretary of education (head of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement) and counselor to the secretary of education from 1991 to 1993. Her lectures on democracy and civic education in countries like the Czech Republic, Germany, Japan, Nicaragua, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and many of the nations that constituted the former Soviet Union have been translated into many languages by the United States Information Agency. In 1989 she became an advisor to Poland's Teachers Solidarity trade union, and in 1991 was awarded a medal by the Polish government for her work on behalf of the Solidarity trade union. Among her other works, she is author of National Standards in American Education: A Citizen's Guide 1995, and The Troubled Crusade: American Education 1945-1980, and co-editor of The Democracy Reader."

Affiliations

 * Director, Albert Shanker Institute.
 * Advisory Board, Children's Scholarship Fund.
 * Advisory Board, Common Good
 * Trustee, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation

Books

 * Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973: A History of the Public Schools as Battlefield of Social Change (Basic Books, 1974).
 * Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (Basic Books, March 2010). Review by Jeff Bale.