About-Face

“I was wrong” is one of the most difficult things for a human being to say. Imagine saying it when you have been a conservative public intellectual and expert on public education for decades. Yet that is exactly what Diane Silvers Ravitch ’60 does in her engaging new memoir, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else.

The author of numerous books about the history of American education and education policy, Ravitch turns to the personal in this volume, describing in depth her childhood in Houston, her experience at a segregated public high school, and her journey to Wellesley College in the fall of 1956.

At Wellesley, Ravitch learned not what to think, but how. She arrived on campus feeling, by her own account, like a “fish out of water.” But the College provided her with brilliant peers, gifted teachers, lively debate, and enriching friendships—including with “Maddy,” Madeleine Korbel Albright ’59. She recounts the hilarity of writing the junior show, Call It Red, and the excitement of seeing Fidel Castro speak at Harvard while she was working as a reporter for the Wellesley News.

A political science major at Wellesley, Ravitch went on to earn a Ph.D. in history from Columbia. As her memoir unfolds, she writes openly of loss—the anguish of the death of her 2-year-old son from leukemia, the painful dissolution of her first marriage. And she writes of love—at an education conference in 1984, she met teacher Mary Butz, who became her wife.

She also writes about intellectual transformation. As an education reformer, Ravitch believed deeply in standards, accountability, high-stakes testing, and school choice. Woven through the book is an account of her transition from outspoken supporter of conservative, market-driven policies in public education to one of their most forceful critics. Like many policymakers of the late 20th century, she saw competition, data, and pressure as levers that could fix public education. Serving in senior government roles, including assistant secretary of education during the George H. W. Bush administration, she helped advance reforms rooted in these assumptions, convinced they would raise achievement and close gaps.

But watching these policies unfold in real schools forced her to confront their consequences. High-stakes testing narrowed curricula and hamstrung teachers. Charter expansion and privatization failed to deliver promised gains while draining critical resources from public systems. Most troubling, education reformers increasingly blamed educators for failures that Ravitch now sees as driven by poverty and inequality. Children—especially poor children—were being left behind.

By the end of An Education, Ravitch emerges as a committed advocate for public schools, professional teachers, and democratic accountability. She followed the facts where they led and changed her mind. In this open-hearted, expansive memoir, she explains why.

A former classroom teacher, Grace is senior associate editor of this magazine

Diane Silvers Ravitch ’60
An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else
Columbia University Press, 248 pages, $24.95

A Lifeline in Letters

In an email to this magazine, Christina Holbrook ’83 described Antiphon as the story of how two Wellesley women “saved each other’s lives.” The book chronicles the yearlong correspondence between Holbrook and Jane Flynn ’83 as they confront devastating losses: the death by suicide of a child and a glioblastoma diagnosis. In their letters, which become a lifeline, the friends bear witness to each other’s pain—and resilience.

Jane Flynn ’83 and Christina Holbrook ’83
Antiphon: A Call and Response in a Year of Grief and Renewal
Ikaros Books, 284 pages, $19.95

Finding Belonging
 

In All Work Is Cultural Work, Nikita Carney ’08, a sociologist at Bentley University, asks what it means to belong in a nation. Drawing on years of ethnographic research in Boston, Montreal, and Paris, Carney explores how Haitian women in diaspora forge belonging and status through paid labor, whether as administrative assistants, dancers, or preschool teachers. Their everyday workplace interactions reveal how often-invisible cultural practices shape their world. Using an intersectional lens, Carney demonstrates that labor and culture are inseparable.

Nikita Carney ’08
All Work Is Cultural Work: Diasporic Haitian Women, Paid Labor, and Cultural Citizenship
Rutgers University Press, 174 pages; $29.95

Back to Life

Tarini Mohan ’08 chronicles the profound disruption an accident caused in her life. Six weeks after she moved to Uganda to work in international development, Mohan was hit by a speeding vehicle while riding in a motorcycle taxi without a helmet, sustaining a traumatic brain injury that left her in a coma for three months. Despite lasting mobility and cognitive challenges, Mohan enrolled in Yale School of Management and earned an M.B.A. Lifequake tells the story of how she got there.

Tarini Mohan ’08
Lifequake: A Story of Hope and Humanity
Juggernaut, 296 pages; available on Amazon.in

Lost, Come Home

In this young adult novel, Holly Goldberg Sloan ’80 introduces Cordy Jenkins, who, grieving her father’s death, feels her family unraveling. When a scruffy, muddy stray dog with bad breath wanders into her life, she names him Lost. The pup becomes a source of hope and healing. Through Lost, Cordy’s family connects with Taj, a compassionate Pakistani American veterinarian, whose kindness helps them toward recovery. Finding Lost shows that after profound loss there is still the possibility of unexpected joy.

Holly Goldberg Sloan ’80
Finding Lost
Rocky Pond Books, 208 pages, $17.99

For a list of new books, albums, and other media by members of the Wellesley community, see “Pages & Playlists.”