It’s kind of sad to see the bizarre behavior of Diane Ravitch as she bathes in the adoration of her new found friends and financiers. In just the last hour Diane sent out 14 tweets. 14! Doesn’t she have anything better to do than to shower the world with such nuggets as:
“unions protect teachers against arbitrary firing, defend education budget in Legislature, Congress.
But as Matt noted over the weekend, someone has taken to “tweeting” under the name “Old Diane Ravitch,” sending quotations from Ravitch’s earlier writings. And those claims are almost as hyperbolic in the opposite direction as are her current claims.
All of this raises the same question that I raised before about whether Ravitch is really a great scholar. She hardly seems like a serious person. And it seems perfectly possible to me that her current horde of devoted followers are just as delusional as were her previous horde. They just like her for saying things that they want to hear and have no ability to judge the substance behind her various claims.
While I’ve never been a Ravitch fan and have always found her to be a bit of an authoritarian blow-hard (then and now), here are some tidbits of wisdom from Old Diane Ravitch that are just hilarious in contrast to her current declarations:
If it is accurate that Diane Ravitch joined Twitter on July 22, 2009 and if she has “tweeted” 9,403 times since then (as is currently indicated on her Twitter page), then she has tweeted an average 14.62 times per day. That’s once every 57 minutes for every waking hour over the last 643 days.
[…] Jay P. Greene on Diane Ravitch’s scholarship as an education historian: “All of this raises the same question that I raised before about whether Ravitch is really a great scholar. She hardly seems like a serious person. And it seems perfectly possible to me that her current horde of devoted followers are just as delusional as were her previous horde. They just like her for saying things that they want to hear and have no ability to judge the substance behind her various claims.” (Jay P. Greene’s Blog) […]
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
If it is accurate that Diane Ravitch joined Twitter on July 22, 2009 and if she has “tweeted” 9,403 times since then (as is currently indicated on her Twitter page), then she has tweeted an average 14.62 times per day. That’s once every 57 minutes for every waking hour over the last 643 days.
That sounds normal to me.
[…] Jay P. Greene on Diane Ravitch’s scholarship as an education historian: “All of this raises the same question that I raised before about whether Ravitch is really a great scholar. She hardly seems like a serious person. And it seems perfectly possible to me that her current horde of devoted followers are just as delusional as were her previous horde. They just like her for saying things that they want to hear and have no ability to judge the substance behind her various claims.” (Jay P. Greene’s Blog) […]