The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

An Education: How I changed My mind about Schools and Almost Everything Else is an eye-opening and deeply personal memoir, intricately wound up with the story of how our nation has been swept up with and jerked around by changing approaches to education. It’s not often that a highly visible scholar or public official admits to the world that he or she has been wrong and goes into detail to explain why. In a just-published memoir, my classmate and friend, Diane Silvers Ravitch, does just that.

A highly accomplished historian of education and a former assistant Secretary of Education (under President George H.W. Bush), Ravitch spent decades leading the movement for standardized testing to achieve educational accountability. A self-described neo-conservative at that time, she was convinced that students wouldn’t learn and advance without standardized testing and universal metrics measuring student progress. She wrote books about it, gave lectures, taught courses, and sat on boards of leading influential conservative think tanks. Virtually her entire career was committed to the principles of competition, meritocracy, standardization and accountability. Until she reached her late sixties.

First, she takes us step by step from childhood in Houston, Texas to her first entry-level job at The New Leader publication, to doing research for the Carnegie Foundation, to writing a history of the New York public schools. Over the years, people like President Gerald Ford and Mayor Michael Bloomberg would seek her advice. She helped the state of California to rewrite history and social science standards. Her whirlwind activities and publications would lead to President George H. W. Bush naming her Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, heading the Office of Education Research and Development.” There, she was surprised to learn that, although officials in the department reviewed proposals, processed grants and disbursed money, very few department employees had ever been teachers.

Ravitch stayed through the end of H.W. Bush’s administration and moved on for 18 months to the Brookings Institution where she published again, on National Standards in American Education. Returning to New York, Mayor Rudy Giuliani invited her to be Superintendent of Schools in New York City, which she happily turned down because, she said, she was “not qualified.”  In 1997, President Bill Clinton appointed her to the national board in charge of the federal testing program. Four years later, she was a guest at the signing of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation (co-sponsored incidentally by liberal MA Senator Ted Kennedy.)  Such was the love affair of this nation with standardized testing. She also still had faith in the “choice” that charter schools could offer.

And so it went. But something wasn’t right. Indeed, many things weren’t right. She researched and analyzed. She immersed herself in the data. She studied all the educational experiments of the era. What she found was that, across the board, the students from higher-income families earned the highest scores and lower-income student did more poorly.  What’s more is that the corporately owned charter schools generally fared no better than public schools, and, worse, the public charter schools diverted tax dollars and undermined public systems.

She concluded that slavish devotion to the testing and inability of teachers to share information and discuss the results with students were counterproductive from a pedagogical perspective and destructive of morale in the schools.  How could individual students learn how to improve?

Ravitch said the lesson (applicable elsewhere today) is “not to get trapped in our own bubbles.”   What she learned was “to anticipate the possibility of uncertainty based on new facts, new insights, to be willing to change as facts change, and to cling ferociously to your integrity, but not your opinions.”

And so she published “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” to expose the dangers of all the initiatives that added up to the privatizing of the public schools in America. In creating the Network for Public Education (NPE), she is continuing today to fight for public education.

This memoir is courageous, honest, data-based, and cogently written. Many of the author’s erstwhile  supporters in the testing movement call her a hypocrite, a turncoat and fault her for doing a 180.  Readers of her memoir may focus on this or on the personal crises that involved childhood abuse, death of her two-year-old, or the bullying and breakup of her marriage to a wealthy and powerful man. For me, the take-away from this account, reflected in the subtitle of the book, is that we have to be big enough to change direction if we learn we are wrong, even in causes that for years we fought like hell to achieve. In Ravitch’s case, the impact of that reversal is much more significant than staying the course just because.