"From her early advocacy for voluntary national standards in the 1980s to her tenure as Assistant Secretary of Education under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Diane Ravitch was an advocate the policies in the style of No Child Left Behind-high-stakes testing, school choice, privatization, and charter schools. Then, as she writes in this memoir, "I looked at what happened when they were put into practice, and I realized how wrong I was." By 2010, with the publication of The Death and Life of the Great American School System, she had repudiated her earlier beliefs, arguing instead for holistic education, stronger social welfare for pregnant women, and rebuking the wave of charter schools, privatization, and union busting that had hollowed out the public school system. "To use current parlance," she writes, "I went from being a staunch conservative to being woke." In this memoir of her lifes work as a historian and policy advocate, Ravitch traces her ideological evolution. From championing evidence-based curriculum and instruction, notably the Core Knowledge movement and the Common Core initiative, to her leftward turn, arguing for stronger collective bargaining for teachers and more investment in public schools.

In this book, she explains her journey-from her childhood in Houston to her education at Columbia to her stints in government in the Department of Education and the National Assessment Governing Board. Through candid reflections on decades of research on education outcomes, Ravitch makes the case for becoming, as she calls herself, "an activist on behalf of public schools.""-- Provided by publisher.