Wit & Attitude Quote by Diane Ravitch

American education has a peculiar addiction: it keeps falling for the next shiny fix, then acting surprised when the glitter wears off. Diane Ravitch’s line lands like a tired sigh from someone who’s watched the same cycle repeat for decades: grand reforms announced with moral certainty, implemented with bureaucratic zeal, and abandoned quietly when the results don’t match the press releases.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “Littered” evokes debris left behind after a parade - not a few honest mistakes, but a landscape cluttered with discarded programs, acronyms, and pilot projects. “Failed fads” indicts not just outcomes but the culture of reform itself: the tendency to treat schooling like a consumer product, where novelty substitutes for evidence. “Foolish ideas” sharpens the critique into a question of judgment, implying that policymakers and philanthropists aren’t merely unlucky; they’re repeatedly seduced by simplistic theories of how children learn and how institutions change.

Ravitch’s context matters. As a historian of education - and a prominent critic of high-stakes testing, privatization, and technocratic accountability - she’s speaking from a long view that exposes how “new” reforms often recycle old assumptions: that metrics can replace trust, that competition will do what community can’t, that a single lever (standards, tests, apps, choice) can move a complex system. The subtext is a warning against amnesia. If the last century is a landfill of reform remnants, the problem isn’t a lack of innovation; it’s a lack of humility, memory, and patience for the slow, unglamorous work schools actually require.