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Thursday, October 14, 2010

Diane Ravitch Unlikely bedfellows at education speech tonight | School Zone | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

Unlikely bedfellows at education speech tonight | School Zone | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

Unlikely bedfellows at education speech tonight

Rice University might want to set up a wrestling ring for an on-campus lecture tonight. Diane Ravitch, a New York University education professor who has flip-flopped her views on the public school reform movement, is speaking at 7 p.m. today in a lecture series sponsored by Teach for America and the KIPP charter network — two entities she doesn't support.

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Ravitch

Ravitch, a native Houstonian, worked as an assistant secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush and was a strong proponent of the mandatory testing put in place by the second President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. But these days, Ravitch has a new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education, in which she rejects the concepts she used to laud.

Don't worry — Ravitch is aware of the sponsors of her speech, said Andrea Hodge, the director of the Rice Education Entrepreneurship