Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Sara Mosle for The Atlantic. To read the complete article, check out other resources, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Illustration: Denise Nestor

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The survival of the school-reform movement, as it’s known to champions and detractors alike, is no longer assured. Even a couple years ago, few would have predicted this turn of events for a crusade that began with the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, gathered momentum as charter schools and Teach for America took off in the 1990s, and surged into the spotlight with No Child Left Behind in 2001. As a schoolteacher, I know I didn’t anticipate this altered landscape. If one person can be credited—or blamed—for the reform movement’s sudden vulnerability, it’s a fiercely articulate historian, now in her 70s, named Diane Ravitch.

That Ravitch helped conceive the movement she now condemns makes her current role even more unexpected. Almost four decades ago, Ravitch emerged as a preeminent chronicler of, as she put it, “the rise and fall of grand ideas” in American education. The author of 11 books, including Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (Alfred A. Knopf, September 2013), she has traced the past century’s successive battles over how best to deliver a quality education—and to whom.

In 1991, she shifted from observer to policy adviser, becoming an assistant secretary of education under George H. W. Bush. An outspoken critic of progressive pedagogical theories, she urged rigorous national standards and gravitated toward conservatives promoting parental choice, vouchers, and charter schools. Market-based alternatives, she decided, were the answer for impoverished parents desperate to see their children escape broken inner-city schools.

A decade later, No Child Left Behind’s bipartisan push for federally mandated assessments brought Ravitch’s favored prescriptions into the mainstream. A growing cadre of social entrepreneurs—including Teach for America’s founder, Wendy Kopp, and many former TFAers, among them the creators of the KIPP charter schools—focused more intently on improving teacher quality. This was the key, they argued, to boosting achievement among disadvantaged students. They attracted generous backers, not least the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Executives from Silicon Valley and Wall Street hedge funds joined the cause, financing new organizations, such as Democrats for Education Reform, to push for more innovation. Soon the movement commanded allegiance from Democrats and Republicans in Congress, secretaries of education from both parties, and several big-city mayors and school superintendents. Ravitch, for her part, briefly advised George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign. The only figures conspicuously absent from this burgeoning coalition seemed to be traditional teachers and their unions, whom many reformers judged a primary obstacle to necessary change.

President Obama embraced his predecessor’s policies with, if anything, greater gusto. His Race to the Top initiative, employing federal stimulus money, encouraged states to open more charter schools, use student test scores to assess teacher quality, and dismantle tenure. The revolution appeared nearly complete. Except that by 2010, Diane Ravitch had broken ranks.

That year, she published a carefully researched book in which she reflected on the movement she’d helped launch but could no longer support. Surveying the data, she concluded that the reform effort was just another in the parade of high hopes that policy makers and practitioners had promoted through the decades. Their strategies couldn’t transform schools into engines of social mobility, because they did little to address the underlying causes of the achievement gap between white and minority students: entrenched segregation and poverty in America’s urban core. The book was called The Death and Life of the Great American School System, but it might as well have been called The Corrections.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Sara Mosle, who teaches writing at Philip’s Academy Charter School in Newark, N.J., has written about education for The New York Times, Slate, and other publications.