Co-sponsored by the Dartmouth College Department of Education's Teacher Education Program and the Vermont School Boards Association.

Diane Ravitch is a research professor of education at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She currently shares a blog called Bridging Differences with Deborah Meier, hosted by Education Week, and also blogs for Politico.com and The Huffington Post. A prolific writer who has published more than 500 articles and reviews for scholarly and popular publications on the subject, Ravitch is internationally acclaimed for her expertise on past and present education.  Her newly published book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools, is an incisive, comprehensive look at today's American school system that argues against those who claim it is broken and beyond repair; an impassioned but reasoned call to stop the privatization movement that is draining students and funding from our public schools. Ravitch argues that the crisis in American education is not a crisis of academic achievement but a concerted effort to destroy public schools in this country. Her 2011 book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, made the case that public education today is in peril. Drawing on her more than 40 years of research and experience, Ravitch critiques today's most popular ideas for restructuring schools, including privatization, standardized testing, punitive accountability, and the multiplication of charter schools, and offers a clear prescription for improving American public schools.