Get to know Diane Ravitch, Joshua Starr's NYC connection

Now that we know Superintendent Joshua Starr has been to New York City to meet with Diane Ravitch, MCPS teachers and parents might like to get to know more about Joshua Starr's NYC supporter.  Here's a City Paper article from 2011.

“Diane and Richard Ravitch divorced in 1986. Today, she lives in a gracious brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, one of the borough’s poshest neighborhoods. Her longtime companion is Mary Butz, a former New York City public school principal who ran a progressive principal-training program that was shut down by former schools chancellor Klein in 2005.
Sporting an electric-blue turtleneck, leggings, and neat silver bowl-cut as she knocks around a living room lined with bookshelves and decorated in eagles, roosters, and red, white, and blue Americana, Ravitch says she enjoys the education-policy pugilism, Twitter fights and all. “If I’m on Twitter it means I’m not writing. But you know, I think fast, and when I see somebody say, ‘this is right, this is wrong,’ then I want to get into an exchange!” But she says her speaking schedule is so exhausting that she plans to make more of her future appearances via video-conferencing.A grandmother of three, Ravitch is also excited about her youngest grandson enrolling, this September, at P.S. 321 in Park Slope, one of New York’s most coveted neighborhood schools. Some 65 percent of the kids are white; 80 percent meet or exceed state standards in math, English, science, and social studies. The PTA fundraises, via PayPal and employer matching, to support supplemental programs. At P.S. 167 in Crown Heights, less than three miles away, 99 percent of students are black and Hispanic; fewer than half perform at grade-level in math and reading. There is a PTA, but it doesn’t have a PayPal-enabled website”

 http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/41083/diane-ravitch-the-anti-rhee/full/