Diane Ravitch may not be a name known in every household, but she has been one of the most influential public intellectuals shaping education policy for nearly 50 years.

Not one of the most consistent, but influential as almost anybody you could name.

Back in the 1970s, she was a loud and proud socialist, helping edit a magazine founded by Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas (a six-time candidate for president under the banner of the Socialist Party). In 1975, she became a historian of education with a Ph.D. from Columbia University. She worked closely with Teachers College president Lawrence A. Cremin, who was her mentor.

Ravich worked for both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton on education policy, and became an early proponent of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind. She was also a great proponent of school choice.

Then she returned to her leftist roots. She is now a harsh critic of school choice and one of the public school system’s biggest cheerleaders.

One could charitably interpret Ravitch’s ideological journey as proof of a supple mind that can absorb new information and change when the facts or one’s interpretation of them does. I admire that quality, even when it leads people away from ideas I like to those I don’t. It’s better than the alternative, and I know I have changed my views many times over the years.

But Ravitch? I know she is super-smart and worth listening to, but I also know that she is blind to her own hypocrisy. And that hypocrisy is glaring. In this her mind’s flexibility is clearest when it comes to separating her practice from what she preaches.

Why didn’t you send your sons to your local public school? You didn’t want the best for them? So you paid for private school in NYC? Make it make sense. pic.twitter.com/hXOhfZTwQh

— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) January 30, 2023

So what about parents who can't afford to pay for private school but want to make the best choice for their kids? They don't deserve the same opportunities as your sons?

— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) January 31, 2023

That’s quite the argument.

• Public schools are the best choice because they are for everybody and unify us. They are the glue of democracy
• You didn’t send YOUR kids to public schools
• I paid for the privilege!

In other words: public schools for the plebs, while we the elite get school choice because we can afford it. This is how democracies come unglued–keeping the plebs away from the elites.

Ironically, this is how socialism works in the real world. I’m not sure if Ravich still clings to her early socialist views, but she surely clings to the socialist culture that in reality affords a small elite the best choices and imposes mediocrity (or worse) on everybody else.

In the Soviet Union that elite was called the Nomenklatura. And over the past 50 or more years a Nomenklatura has been developing in the US. I call them the Elite™, but whatever you want to call them they all behave the same way.

Rage about climate change, live in a mansion, drive in caravans of SUVs to the private airport and take your private plane to an exotic locale to whinge even more about climate change. Eat filet mignon while recommending crickets to the unwashed.

It’s a pattern repeated endlessly with every type of opportunity that people can have. Reserving the best for an elite which claims to have the people’s best interest at heart, while condemning those people to inferior lives.

Opposition to school choice has nothing to do with ensuring “unity” or opportunity. The schools teach disunity, racial hatred, perverse ideologies, and precious little math and reading. That’s why the kids of people who can afford it bail out of the public schools. Ravitch and her cohorts don’t want their kids to mix with the plebs’, so they keep them out.

The public schools’ main job is to pay teachers and administrators, ensuring the flow of union dollars used to fund Democrat campaigns. That is what they do, in the main. That, and teach execrable ideologies to impressionable children. Math, science, and English are all racist, so let’s teach race hatred instead.

Socialist policies are usually pursued by people who have successfully climbed up the economic and social ladder and now want to pull that ladder up so nobody new can do so. That is always their effect–reducing, not increasing social and economic mobility. They cement an aristocracy at the top of society.

Is that Ravitch’s goal? I doubt it. But that is the effect of her policies. For some reason, even after 5 decades of studying public education, she has yet to acknowledge how deplorable a failure it is.

She knows it though. And that is why she exercised her own personal school choice and sent her kids to private schools.