Great post by Chris Edwards responding to historian Diane Ravitch’s op-ed in today’s Washington Post. For a good ripping apart of Ravitch’s reality-free thinking from an education-policy standpoint, check out my review of her new book over at School Reform News.

Oh, and let’s please get something straight: Ravitch has never been the one-time “strong supporter” of school choice she claims to have been. Sadly, this claim seems designed mainly to make it appear that she’s had some sort of serious “come (back) to public schools” moment. But as she writes in her new book, she had never really given much thought to choice until she joined the George H.W. Bush administration in 1991, and then she just tried to cram it into her “worldview.”

“The issue of choice had never really been important to me,” she writes, “but I found myself trying to incorporate the arguments for choice into my own worldview.”

Does this sound either like a strong supporter of choice, or someone who had really thought choice through and understood why and how it would work? Nope, and that comes right through in her simplistic conclusion that because really limited choice like charter schools and tiny voucher programs don’t make huge differences, all choice should be abandoned.