Major omission in Ravitch article

Liam Julian raises some very good questions about the REAL reason Ravitch switched teams.  I, too, have more information that what's written here and I'm convinced that her switch was triggered by a personal vendetta against Joel Klein, NOT (as she claims) an honest intellectual decision, driven by new data/information:

Major omission in Ravitch article

Posted by Liam Julian on June 23, 2011 at 10:27 am

Washington City Paper has published a lengthy article about Diane Ravitch. Deep in the piece is a sentence noting that Ravitch's longtime partner was once a New York City public-school principal whose program was "shut down" by Joel Klein in 2005 (I'm told the program was not "shut down," actually, but that Ravitch's partner was summarily replaced by Klein with someone with business training), which is about the time that Ravitch began her constant antagonism (right or wrong) of Klein's education policies and her general shift away from the "education reform" she had long championed. The reporter, Dana Goldstein, fails to make the obvious connection—that Ravitch's purportedly intellectual shift was catalyzed by a hard personal shove—and ask her subject about it [addendum: or report that her subject refused to talk about it on the record]. This seems to me a seminal point, one far too important to have been overlooked.

I wrote Goldstein to ask about this seeming oversight. She (just this second, in fact) responded with an explanation, but asked that I keep the contents of her e-mail confidential. Will do. Let me say, though, that I'm dissatisfied by her justification. Reporters must ask the tough, relevant questions, especially the obvious ones. When they do not, when they elide necessary and important facets of the story, they and their story necessarily bleed credibility, and readers lose.