Politics & Power Quote by Diane Ravitch

Complacency is a deceptively soft word for what Ravitch is really naming: a political and cultural anesthetic. It is the shrug that lets inequity harden into “just the way it is,” and the bureaucratic comfort that keeps systems running smoothly even when outcomes are ugly. By casting complacency as the greatest obstacle, Ravitch shifts attention from the usual villains reform debates love to spotlight - unions, testing, “bad teachers,” underfunding - to a more pervasive enemy: the broad coalition of people who benefit from stability, fear disruption, or have learned to treat school failure as someone else’s problem.

The line works because it turns reform into a moral test rather than a technical project. If the obstacle is complacency, then data, pilot programs, and glossy “innovation” initiatives are not enough; the missing ingredient is urgency. That subtext lands squarely in the era of high-stakes accountability and market-style school reforms, when “change” often meant narrowing curriculum, expanding test prep, and celebrating choice as a substitute for capacity. Ravitch, a historian who famously re-evaluated her earlier support for certain reforms, is warning that complacency can wear two masks: the complacency of defenders of the status quo and the complacency of reformers convinced their solutions are self-evidently righteous.

Contextually, it’s also an indictment of American exceptionalism in education policy: the belief that incremental tweaks will do, that communities will tolerate segregated schools, chronic underinvestment, and teacher churn indefinitely. Ravitch’s point is blunt: the system can absorb scandal. What it can’t survive is sustained attention.