"We are in the grips of a kind of national madness," Diane Ravitch told me, "closing schools, firing teachers, shutting down public education." What makes this statement interesting is that, for many years, Ravitch was a powerful voice within the national education reform movement she now rejects as faddish, empirically unfounded, and bad for America's kids.

As assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush, Ravitch became an outspoken supporter of educational testing, school choice, charter schools, and No Child Left Behind. Later, she championed those positions as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board (the entity that oversees education testing in the United States) and through her involvement with two prominent conservative think tanks, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Koret Task Force.

Today, Ravitch refers to the reforms she once championed as "deforms." Her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, documents her own reversal and the impact of current education policy on communities, schools, families, teachers, and students. When I spoke with her, she was frank and thoughtful about the experience of coming to reject what were once some of her most deeply held beliefs. "For years," she told me, "people would say to me, ‘Well, I don't agree with everything you write,' and I would think, 'Thanks a lot, that's some compliment.' But now I say, ‘Well, I don't agree with everything I write, so why should you?' "

That's a great description of how we are all inclined to react when someone disagrees with us.  I love how Ravitch calmly embraces the ongoing evolution of her perspective. 

Ravitch describes the difficult process of changing her mind:

It was gradual. I think what happens is that over time you get to know all the arguments—all the arguments on your side, all the arguments on the other side—and you just say "Nah, they're wrong." And then at some point you think, Well, are they really wrong? What about this? Or Well, they're right about that. Or Maybe this thing I've been advocating for is wrong in this one situation. You start feeling the certainty begin to dissipate. I guess I started to see things that created a lot of chinks in my own intellectual defenses. I tend to be skeptical of things, and I found my skepticism turning toward the people that I was a part of and turning toward myself.

Ravitch now recognizes that destroying public education in America will undermine our society and result in regression to what it was like before the advent of public education.  (A great catch-all term for willful ignorance, reality denial and anti-intellectualism is "endarkenment"-- witness the current mess with the Texas Board of Education for an example of endarkenment.) Ravitch also saw the negative outcomes of the push for increasing testing, and articulates her own (incredulity-based) rationalizations of the practice:

Seeing the results of testing, for one. There was a long period of time where I thought, what's wrong with testing? We test people all the time; you go to the doctor, you have tests. But as I saw the consequences begin to kick in, I realized, this isn't just testing. People are being punished because of test scores. We've created a system where Mrs. Smith is going to teach nothing but what's tested. The arts aren't tested and the sciences aren't tested, and the conservative response to that is, "Well, test everything." But the problem is—and this is another thing I found myself recoiling from—then you'll do nothing but test. People tend to scoff at anything that's subjective, but it's the essays and the projects that make it fun for kids and give them an opportunity to show comprehension.

So that made me stop and think. And then, too, I became very outspoken in my criticism of Bloomberg, which created this tremendous tension between me and almost everyone else on the conservative side of the spectrum.

As I said above, it's really hard to admit a mistake.  A powerful part of this is that admitting an error might alienate all of your friends and allies. It take great courage to buck entrenched peer-group paradigms:

I think the hardest thing is just to say you've made a mistake. If you can reach that juncture, which is very hard, then you can begin to understand how you got there. I'm not sure that I myself understand how I got there. I attribute it to having been in the [first] Bush administration. I didn't really have a strong position on choice and accountability when I started there, and I can see now how I was really shaped just by interchange with people. It's the social consensus; you're surrounded by people with the same ideas. You develop over the years a whole set of relationships with people who agree with you and you read the things on your side that say you're right, and you look at the things written on the other side and you say, "Oh, gosh, it's too bad they haven't seen the light."

The article in Slate is awesome, and I can't wait to read Ravitch's book.  Here's what I said in thanking my friend for sending the link:

She's very thoughtful about how the evidence against her previously held dogma piled up and piled up until she had to face reality.  What I also think is fantastic is how readily the people she once butted heads with welcome her.  We're all fallible, and it takes real courage to alter our paradigms as credible evidence warrants.