Diane Ravitch is an education historian, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University. She was also the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education. She has a significant influence in the field as evidenced by her heavily cited bodies of scholarly work alongside her public and professional roles within the education community.
She has over 150,000 followers on her Twitter account where she frequently tweets and retweets on the social and political implications of current educational policy, research, innovations, and myths. Additionally, she writes extensively on her blog at http://dianeravitch.net. With over 100,000 tweets, it is apparent that she is committed to the field of education beyond scholarly pursuits in cultivating serious contributions to the education debate via public discourse on Twitter. It would be difficult to summarise her thoughts on educational issues due to her high activity, but based on a quick exploration alongside supplemental articles elucidating her tweets, some key ideas can be identified:
Ravitch is a staunch supporter of public education and publicly airs her views on educational reform efforts that promote and fund its advancement, as well as conflicting activities that undermine its value.
Ravitch (2016) identifies an existential threat to the future of public education in the case where legislators directly intervene in school reform based on media stereotypes without truly understanding the condition and potentials of public schools. She argues that modern reforms, particularly the call towards the privatization of schools (Ravitch, 2013), has caused educational systems to stagnate. Underlying such movements are economic and business narratives that are not driven by the priority to help society become more literate and better educated. Her views garner support from school teachers who retweet her views in their circles.
It is important to note that multiple layers of sharing are mediated via Twitter. The content of the tweet above was first shared on Ravitch’s personal blog; its post URL was then shared on her Twitter feed; the post catches her followers’ attentions who then retweets her blog link – now adding their support to her discourse (“Ravitch likes it a lot”); which Ravitch then retweets as a show of the support that her views have gained. As such, the ability to share and remix allows Twitter to become a window whereby current attitudes and beliefs are circulated between overlapping and even new circles that go beyond Ravitch’s direct sphere of influence. On the other hand, by this very nature, it also provokes the question of ownership (Marshall & Shipman, 2011). The way thoughts can be shared, re-used, or deleted causes one to question how much value a remixed artifact holds, as well as the honor it still affords to its source. Additionally, such social sharing practices enabled by the follow function on Twitter promote the rise of a “digital humanities community” (Grandjean, 2016) whereby “who’s following who” reveals the structure of a network’s relationship as well as identify users whose position is particular, in this case, Ravitch.
Ravitch promotes the use of comprehensive and balanced curricula in public education that promotes optimal self-development.
Ravitch (2012) argues that it is a public duty to empower good public schools with “adequate resources and a rich curriculum in every neighborhood”. She engages her followers in this direction by posting relevant context, likewise, users engage her attention by sending her relevant resources which she “validates” by the act of retweeting.
It would be naive to claim that Ravitch vouches for a curriculum-centered rather than learner-centered pedagogy based on her support for rich curriculums in public schools. However, her views bring to light the current curriculum crisis faced by schools as argued by curriculum theorists (Young, 2013), who observe that recent developments in curriculum theory have led to it losing its main “object” when it is not designed in a way that honors the learner’s entitlement to knowledge. A knowledge-based approach to curriculum design is reflective of some aspects in Piaget’s (as quoted in Good et al., 1978) cognitive learning theory which places focus on how learning is developed through the internal-processing of information. When public schools “understand” learning correctly, they are more likely to find meaning and consistency in their implementation of knowledge via balanced curriculum designs that promote wholesome self-development.
Ravitch identifies the consequences of inequity that plague education beginning from early childhood, as well as corresponding methods of knowledge-measurement that compromise student achievement and educational policy at large.
Ravitch (2012) argues that modern educational methods such as standardized testing only serve well to reflect gaps without closing them, thus, they should only be used for diagnostic purposes rather than for accountability. In this sense, it could be said that Ravitch rejects behaviorist approaches that center around measurable outcomes and the corresponding change of behavior via stimuli-response associations i.e. simplistic relationships between standardized testing and student results. Policy reforms that are driven by such results do not offer solutions to endemic inequalities in education, more importantly, do not promote optimal grounds for learning.
Ravitch engages in political debate relating to educational issues with reference to mainstream culture – differing from traditional academic scholarship – which invites public conversation.
A notable blurring of power takes place when, via Twitter, regular citizens not on Ravitch’s level of scholarship or influence can engage in short but direct discourse with her on pressing educational issues of a national scale. The “scalability” of her message is enhanced by the fact that it was posted on a platform that allowed for responses to be received from anyone and anywhere. While she retains the choice to highlight (retweet) certain opinions, it is important to note that her choice to highlight serious issues with reference to mainstream culture frames these issues in a way that allows for non-academic individuals to join in the conversation, and, in turn, provoke their deeper thinking.
References
Marshall, C. C., & Shipman, F. M. (2011). Social media ownership: Using twitter as a window onto current attitudes and beliefs. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1081-1090. doi:10.1145/1978942.1979103
Good, R., Mellon, E. K., & Kromhout, R. A. (1978). The work of Jean Piaget. Journal of Chemical Engineering, 55, 688-693.
Grandjean, M. (2016). A social network analysis of twitter: Mapping the digital humanities community. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 3. doi: 10.1080/23311983.2016.1171458
Ravitch, D. (2012). Diane ravitch tackles key education issues. Retrieved from https://www.educationworld.com/a_admin/rubin/election-education-issues-ravitch.shtml
Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to america’s public schools. Manhattan, NY: Random House LLC.
Ravitch, D. (2016, October 11). Diane Ravitch on public education [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/z5rFx9EZsHo
Young, M. (2013). Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory: A knowledge-based approach. Curriculum Studies, 45(2), 101-118. doi: 10.1080/00220272.2013.764505