Diane Ravitch Quotes

The greatest obstacle to those who hope to reform American education is complacency.

I believe public education is the new civil rights battle and I support charter schools.

We have done a poor job educating people about education. Only when we have clarified that can we talk about how best to achieve it.

I believe the government should ensure all children are provided with a good education.

I have maintained a passionate interest in education, which leads me occasionally to make foolish and ill-considered remarks alleging that not everything is well in our schools.

For six and a half years, I had responsibility for leading the Labour party policy on education and delivering on our promise of improved opportunities for all our children.

I started Knewton to do my bit to fix the world's education system.

That the state of knowledge in any country will exert a directive influence on the general system of instruction adopted in it, is a principle too obvious to require investigation.

America's public schools have served their purpose. Free and compulsory education was good for a somewhat unpromising young nation.

I've worked in public education for 30 years - as a teacher, a lawyer and union leader. I've visited hundreds of schools and districts. I've seen leaders from the classroom to the national stage who have been willing to set aside their differences and do the hard work that's necessary to create real, enduring change.

Comprehensive schools, as too few understand, have never been designed to improve education.

Federal government has forced a one-size-fits-all model on our education system.

I had a moment where I left journalism, and I started getting interested in this issue and writing about it, where I felt there was a right side and a wrong side around a lot of these issues relating to education.

Education is the only billion dollar industry that tolerates abject failure.

In Barack Obama, we have a great education president who is rebuilding America. His Race to the Top program is doing more to 'spur us' to improve our public schools than anything we've ever done as a nation.

Even on education, his one accomplishment, the Leave No Child Behind Act, and he has left it unfunded.

Looking ahead, I can see more and more instances where I will disagree with the president on very fundamental issues. The largest, for me, is education.

You cannot simply put more money into the same system and get better results, so we will need to reform and innovate in the delivery of education.

Obviously, this whole 'no child left behind' idea is more rhetoric than actual practice.

Frankly, I'm not sure how far I would get if I attended public school today. It's not just that public schools aren't producing the results we want - it's that we're not giving them what they need to help students achieve at high levels. K-12 education in the United States is deeply antiquated.

Teach For America was built on the idea that our best hope of reaching 'One Day' is to have thousands of alumni use their diverse experiences and ideas to effect change from inside and outside the education system.

All you've got to do is go back and look in the early 1900s and see what we had in Texas without public education and realize what it has done for the state.

Countries have largely been left alone to handle or ignore their educational problems as they see fit. In part, this was because we assumed that the contexts and challenges were so different from nation to nation that education could not be tackled at the international level.

I'm not a very good advertisement for the American school system.

What makes me angry? The education of children. How in God's name can you expect to have a functioning society the way we teach our kids?