Whether or not you agree with the content (and I'd bargain that only those political stakeholders who have put all their chips on hollow, newfangled education reforms would disagree with it), this book provides a nuanced and eye-opening context for the educational reforms that are being put into place today. Ravitch refuses to do what knee-jerk journalists (of the left and the right) do: instead, she thinks long and hard about about the "fixes" that have been plaguing American education since No Child Left Behind. Anyone who is interesting in education should give up on WSJ and NYT editorials with their trite silver-bullet solutions and war whoops, and read this instead.