review coming soon...

I had no idea Education in the US was such a disaster before reading this book.

The author is a historian and served in the Dept of Education under the Bush and Obama administrations so she’s very knowledgeable on the subject but also has a way of writing and explaining things so that someone like me (read: no professional background in Education) can grasp the concepts. Ravitch does a really good job of laying out the facts and then letting the reader infer where there are problems or issues. On some of the issues, she actually argues both sides.

Cool book, I’m sure I’ll pick it up again in the future if I ever have kids and grow frustrated from first hand experience with our education system.

A lucid analysis of the pitfalls of recent educational reform movements. Ravitch, a former member of the Bush administration demonstrates the follies in "choice" and market driven systems which assume that consumer behavior applies to education. Ravitch points out the core flaws in this theory: student "consumers" do not necessarily know how to make the best educational choices, and schools are evaluated on their ability to sell a "product" to many students who are actively hostile to it. Despite some irksome name-dropping and a tendency to repeat the same statements 3 times in a row, this is a valuable read. Media accounts of "miracle" charter schools and aggressive turnarouds often fail to do the necessary follow-up; Ravitch points out that many of these trumpeted interventions have resulted in negligible long term gains, especially for the poor and minority students who need help most.


Hmmm...some of the educational gimmickry she describes is in use at my daughter's school: "text to self connections" indeed!

This book marks the first time I have been sucked in to a political nonfiction. Very insightful... and often maddening.

This was a very powerful book. It made me reflect a lot on what I am actually doing at my job, what I used to do at my job, and how they are so very different in so many ways. Many, many things rang true to my current situation. Too many.

If you are involved in any way, shape, or form in education, you should read this book. For many people I know, it is 'reading to the choir' - but there are too many hard facts from major studies to back up the 'choir's' ideas to not read it. If you don't really understand how NCLB works, read this book. If you have a child/children in any type of school (other than homeschooling), read this book. If you ever want to have a child/children in school, read this book.

Basically, it boiled down to one major point for me - my future will be determined, in large part, in how the students of TODAY are educated. In only a short period of time the students of today will be my surgeons, doctors, nurses, payroll accountants, coworkers, people who design the things I travel in/on, people who fix the things I rely upon to live, and people who make the choices that run the country's systems..

If the schooling system in America is broken, my future will be broken. Unless you are already retired, YOUR future will be broken. Read this book to see what is going on in education, and why people need to take some action and make changes. Even if you only read the first and last chapters, you will get a solid idea of the current issues.

Much change going on in Education across our Nation. Politicians don't care about kids they just use them to get their parents' vote. This book supports this believe.

Actually giving one star to this combination of regret and restatement of the obvious is being generous. Ravitch basically spent her time in the 80s and early 90s promoting the testing and "choice" trends that now dominate a lot of the education establishment. She basically now had a change of heart and is going against most of what she actively promoted. This is a history of American education mostly looking at the end of the 20th century into today. If you have kept up with what has been going on, this book will not tell you anything new. In my case, all I have to do is look at my daughter's school and their constant obsession with standardized testing and how they pretty much teach to the test to see the results of Ravitch and her ilk: a major stifling of creativity and independent thinking, students who graduate mostly with one skill--the ability to fill bubbles on a multiple choice sheet, and who are barely knowledgeable of basic skills or the information and knowledge they need to be good, informed civic-minded active citizens.

Her conclusions are not that much better. Yes, we need major changes. Yes, we need a major exercise of collective will for the public good. Yes, we need stronger curricula, stronger instruction, better teachers (who are better paid as well, something Ravitch barely touches). Yes, we need to stop thinking of schools as businesses. These are things that others have said before, and they have said them much more eloquently. To me, as a former teacher and now librarian, this book seems like too little too late. The damage is already done, and it is going to take a lot of effort and will, things seriously lacking in a society that does not value education, and where anti-intellectualism is becoming the norm, to fix things. And there lies the tragedy, well, for the U.S. Meanwhile the rest of the world will continue to do better on skills tests overall than the U.S. given they have things like strong curricula, teachers and resources. These are things we could have and that we could do, but as a society we choose not to. Tragic indeed.

This is a thoughtful, well-researched book from someone with a long history of watching educational reform efforts unfold, and indeed being part of them; she was a high-ranking official in the US DoE during the crafting of NCLB. Chapter by chapter she spells out what is wrong with ideas of choice, NCLB, testing, and accountability as any kind of panacea. Indeed, instead of being a panacea these approaches are undermining American public schools. Some of my quick takeaways: Race to the Top is ill-conceived and arbitrarily developed; the testing industry is called by an insider "incredibly slipshod;" the high stakes attached to testing can lead to cheating, and charter schools have 4 times the incidence of documented cheating as traditional public schools; she likes Catholic schools where everyone takes the same college-prep courses and minorities attain better graduation rates and college success, but charters are threatening these schools; public schools and education for all children are the foundation of our democracy and parents should be able to trust that their neighborhood school is a great place to educate their child; if a high-quality curriculum is in place, American students can do very well on international tests and on the NAEP (she points to Minnesota's earth science curriculum and Minnesota's 8th-graders' results on international tests in that subject; she says of all the states, only Massachusetts had high quality curriculum in place for all subjects). However, this is a bit dated at this point. At the time of the writing, the Common Core Standards were being developed. Let us see if these help at all.

Diane Ravitch is a historian, and it shows in the meticulous attention that she gives to the topic of education, and how our current 'solutions' are failing. It was incredibly refreshing to read a book on a controversial topic that was well researched and, for the most part, unbiased. She takes her time building an incredibly strong case against testing and school choice by showing studies that both support and contradict her thesis, all the while questioning conventional beliefs about education.

In the end, she spends a chapter outlining what needs to happen for our educational system to improve. Not all of her recommendations are specific - but she openly acknowledges that those areas need more investigation and planning.

Highly recommended book for anyone with even a remote interest in our educational system and it's issues.

I grabbed this book after I saw an interview with Ravitch on The Daily Show last month. She writes about No Child Left Behind and the resulting focus on testing in reading and math. Her argument is that this focus (and all of the educational fads that came along with it) are taking the focus off of creating a full curriculum. The tests are also being used as the only measure of student, teach, and school success when they were only created to evaluate a single student skill. She looks at fascinating cases in San Diego and New York.

A fascinating read and an important one in this time of blaming teachers' unions for all of the problems in education.