Old Diane Ravitch has now created one of those computer animated videos in which she debates her future self, all done with actual quotes from the once and future Diane Ravitch. This is the funniest thing to hit the internet since Homestarrunner.
If I were as tech savvy as Current Diane, I’d figure out how to embed the video here. But since I am a Luddite, just follow this link.
And in case you doubt how tech savvy Current Diane is, consider this:
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.
[UPDATE: Old Diane Ravitch helpfully put her debate with Future Self on Youtube. Now I can embed it in the post. Thank you, Old Diane. You are the best (even if you were a blowhard authoritarian and perhaps a lousy scholar back then).
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
Did you see this Ravitch quote from 2000?
Click to access mics5.pdf
“Many of our most esteemed education reformers today are saying, I hate privatization, but give me the money and don’t hold me accountable. . . . friends of public education should stop acting as though everyone
wants to leave. This simply is not the case. Believe in public education. Believe that it is working for most kids, because if it is not, you should not defend it.”
If you think about this whole debate from a capitalist standpoint it makes a lot of sense that Ravitch would jump ship and switch sides. The unions are getting beat up by the swelling ranks of ed reformers. The market is very much crowded among the reform advocates and a little thin on the status quo defenders.
There are still lots of people demanding to be told they’re right, that the status quo works and that public education will work if only it has enough money. There isn’t a lot of high quality service providers and the competition is pretty thin. Its kind of how Fox News marketed to conservatives a large segment of the American population that was underserved by the saturated left-wing media.
That’s a good theory, Patrick, but I’m inclined toward a psychological explanation. Anyone who tweets every 57 minutes for the last 2 years is either a teenager, self-promoting celebrity, or someone desperately seeking attention. Yes, the field is less competitive on the status quo side, but I suspect the motivation is attention and not money. Of course, one could desire both.
Yup, those “swelling ranks of ed reformers” are a pretty rough crowd.
Why I understand that Checker Finn’s a high-up member of MS-13 and has arranged for more then a few peaceful SEIU members to be roughed up at their monthly “Kumbaya” sing-a-thons just to intimidate the NEA. That’s why no one’s ever seen Finn in a t-shirt; his tats would show.
BTW, I do’t think Homestarrunner has been updated in awhile. What happened?
9,403 was yesterday. As of now, she has tweeted 9,474 times, an increase of 71. Perhaps she uses Twitter a lot more since her book came out.
71 Tweets! That’s one every 12 minutes of the waking day. I suspect that her rate of Tweeting has increased dramatically over the last 2 years.
Wow, Old Diane is kind of hot…those legs just go on and on…
It’s now been one week since this post, and her Twitter count is up to 9,818. That’s an average of 59 per day.