In the March 13 issue of The New York Review of Books, Diane Ravitch published a scurrilous and overheated attack on school reform and the role the John M. Olin Foundation played decades ago in supporting scholars who promoted those reforms. As a former executive director of the John M. Olin Foundation and a supporter of charter schools and school vouchers, I was dismayed to read an article asserting that “racist” motives lay behind these efforts to improve America’s schools. I sent a letter in response to the article to the editor of The New York Review of Books, who decided not to publish it. I am grateful to the editors of The New Criterion for publishing it here.
Letter to the Editor, New York Review of Books
[email protected]
To the Editor:
Diane Ravitch condemns (“Selling Out Our Public Schools,” in The New York Review of March 13, dubbed on the magazine’s cover “The Racist Roots of School Vouchers”) scholars and charitable foundations that support school vouchers, tax credits, and charter schools, claiming that they are involved in a campaign to destroy the public schools. She asserts, both via the magazine’s cover tagline and in comments in the opening paragraphs, that advocates may have racial motives in doing so, noting that southern states seized on vouchers as a means of evading desegregation orders from the federal courts. The photo accompanying the article, depicting three of the first black students to attend Little Rock Central High School in 1957, is meant to reinforce that interpretation.
Ms. Ravitch writes that the John M. Olin Foundation, of which I was the executive director for two decades until it closed in 2005, was a major financial sponsor of the movement and therefore a leader in what she regards as an illegitimate campaign. She also indicts the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, also a supporter of school reform, along the same irresponsible lines.
It is true that the John M. Olin Foundation, like the Bradley Foundation, supported scholars and organizations promoting school reform, including vouchers, in the belief that it would promote competition in the educational system and provide parents with alternatives to failing public schools. Ms. Ravitch fails to disclose that she was one of the beneficiaries of this support from the 1980s into the early 2000s when she was associated with Columbia University’s Teachers College and the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University.
Annual reports for the Olin Foundation in 1987 and 1988 list grants of $85,000 in each year to support John M. Olin Research Fellowships for Diane Ravitch at Columbia University. Later in the 1990s, according to annual reports, the Olin Foundation supported her research for several years at the Program on Education and Civil Society at NYU, where she promoted school-reform efforts, including vouchers. In the acknowledgements to her book, Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform (2000), she wrote, “The writing of this book was generously supported by the Spencer Foundation and the John M. Olin Foundation.” The book was an extended criticism of progressive reforms in public education.
In that period, Ms. Ravitch wrote that public education would benefit from tougher standards, choice, deregulation, and vouchers. She wrote that “Vouchers and charters will not destroy public education. This is an incredible and fantastical fear.” She was right about that. If there were racial motives behind the voucher movement, as she suggests, she had good reason to be aware of it when she supported the movement and accepted funds from the Olin Foundation. She said nothing along those lines at the time.
Ms. Ravitch has every right to change her mind about school reform, as she and others have done. But there is a difference between changing one’s mind and losing it altogether: readers might wonder how she maintains any perspective on these issues when her thinking swings, pendulum-like, from one extreme to the other. Worse still, she infuses her commentary with a moral indictment of those with whom she now disagrees and imputes dark motives to scholars with whom she once collaborated and institutions that once supported her work.
James Piereson
Executive Director and Trustee, John M. Olin Foundation, 1985–2005; the foundation made its last grant and disbanded in 2005.
