It's time to admit Diane Ravitch's troubled crusade derails honest debate about public education

I should start adding a qualifier when I say the former scholar and historian Diane Ravitch is the Ann Coulter of education commentary.In fairness, Coulter has better manners and makes more attempts to employ logic as she "owns" the libs with verbal Jujitsu.Ravitch, by contrast, has fallen irreparably into polemics so much that her daily blogs put her in league with Alex Jones' made-for-YouTube Info Wars.Along those lines, her blog-fart today ties "the charter industry" to the "infamous pedophile and "super-rich" Jeffrey Epstein."In 2013, his foundation issued a press release announcing that he looked forward to the dominance of charter schools in Washington, D.C. and predicted that they would succeed because they were unregulated," she crows.Then she offers crude analysis of why people like Epstein would want to privatize schools in D.C.:

People often ask me, “Why do the super-rich cluster to the cause of privatization?” The Answer is not simple because many different motives are at work. Some see giving to charters as a charitable endeavor, and their friends assure them that they are “giving back,” helping poor children escape poverty. Others want to impress their friends in their social strata, their colleagues in the world of high finance. Being a supporter of charter schools is like belonging to the right clubs, going to the right parties, sharing a cause with other very rich people.

If you are reading this you probably know that Ravitch was once a charter school supporter, and that makes it fair to ask which camp of nincompoops she fell into?Did she see charters as a "charitable endeavor," or was charter support her attempt to "impress [her] friends in [her] social strata, [and her] colleagues in the world of high finance."Only she can say, but as an established scholar of education history (and a player in policy) it's doubtful her support was so in want of a factual basis.During testimony to Congress conservative William Bennett gave decades ago he invoked Ravitch as a bipartisan voice for school choice.Regarding the school reforms that were advancing in Chicago under Mayor Daley and Paul Vallas Bennett declared "[t]he empirical evidence, now widely available, is irrefutable: Not only are many of our public-schools not getting better, they are getting worse. American students finish in the bottom half, and often near the bottom, in comparison to students from other industrialized nations."Then, after promoting the benefits of charter schools, he asked lawmakers to "follow my friend Diane Ravitch's prescript" to:

...make Title I into a "portable entitlement" that would aid all poor kids regardless of what school they attend. This is the one way to assure that every single Title I child will receive Title I services at the school they currently attend. This is also the best way to assure accountability. If a parent is not satisfied with the Title I services they are getting, they can take their Title I dollars with them to the school or provider of choice; power to the parents, and not bureaucrats, in other words.

Was Ravitch's support for school choice back then the result of suspicious philanthropy, or glossy marketing to mindless parents, or, more logically,  the result of her considerable scholarship by that point in her life?Again, only she can say.In the spring of 1997 she praised then-New York Pataki's proposed charter school policies that allowed groups other than local boards to grant charters, allowed for an un-capped number of charters to open, and allowed these schools to hire teachers who weren't state certified.Why?In supporting Pataki's push she said:

It's impossible to know whether a law permitting charter schools will emerge from this session of the Legislature; the opposition of the teachers' union, which is the most powerful voice in Albany on education issues, is certainly not encouraging. This is unfortunate, for a large and vital network of charter schools in New York would offer hope to educators, parents, and students in troubled school districts and would promote higher academic standards for all the state's public schools.

Why would she support such craven policies of such anti-democratic that today she maligns as wealthy pedophiles and privatizers? Projection much?Forget that teachers' unions - the ones Ravitch herself once admitted were the "most powerful voices in education" - today block legislation making it a crime for teachers to sexualize students, defeat resolutions that called for them to re-dedicate their profession to student achievement, and pay retail civil rights organizations to defeat the voices of their grassroots members.Here's the real kick to the taco, when Lamar Alexander pitched the idea that every D.C. school should be converted to a charter (in 1997, six years before Epstein arrived at the same conclusion) he ascribed this definition of charter schools to his friend Diane Ravitch:

Think of a charter school as a public school district with only one school. It receives public funds, agrees to meet clear academic standards and accepts all students who apply. Unlike existing public schools, it has a contract that can be revoked if the school fails to make good on its commitments.

If she were at all generous she would at very least admit the decency of long-term charter backers who hold valid theories for why charters improve the educational landscape. The longstanding arguments for charters could still be had in clean exchanges between judicious people - sans Ravitch - if we seek understanding and progress. The tensions between autonomy and regulation, local control and federal oversight, and public education as an institution or as a service to American learners could still be exercised by smart people truly seeking solutions to the inarguable problems of public schooling.But not if we follow the zero-sum and divisive lead of Ravitch whose enemy-imaging toward those who differ on policy has escalated so far she no longer sees them as human. We'll predictably end up in her abyss of false binaries, intellectual excursions, and forlorn paralysis.Given Ms. Ravitch's clever wits and stockpile of information I can't imagine she leads us to that confused, somber place by accident. There is no better way to ensure the education establishment's special interests - those who are among Ravitch's most ardent disciples - are never brought to account than to ignore the brisk but level Ravitch of yesteryear and listen to the caustic and battled one before us now.