This was an interesting read, both in terms of the experience of the writing and the content. Ravitch has a compelling voice that balances passion based on expertise with personable accessibility. She incorporates mounds of evidence, but the prose never becomes dry. That said, the epilogue added on to the revised and expanded edition did feel fairly redundant, and could have been cut down by quite a bit.

In terms of the content, at first I was invigorated by her arguments against the trends in testing and school choice--both areas where I agree with her. But as I continued to read, I began to take issue with some more nuanced things, particularly in the latter half of the book. For one, I noticed that Ravitch decries the focus on standardized testing (again, I heartily agree with her on this point), but also uses data from standardized testing to prove some points.

I also encountered a handful of moments of referring to or discussing children with disabilities that felt ableist--for example, seemingly creating a false dichotomy between "disabled" and "motivated" students, or equating disability with being "difficult" (in the context of test-based school & teacher evaluation), or framing disability as a problem vis a vis education. Now, I don't know if this was a failure of phrasing on Ravitch's part or a reflection of her underlying beliefs, but the issue deserves to be raised.

Finally, while Ravitch (I believe rightly) emphasizes that there are many socio-economic inequities underlying and causing poor "performance" of schools & students, and that these issues are not the schools' fault but rather the consequence of inappropriate priorities at the government level, she also doesn't question the ways in which curriculum & pedagogy, even when robust and impassioned, can perpetuate the hegemonic Western culture that then perpetuates those inequalities. In other words, while Ravitch calls for a return to a liberal arts, citizenship-oriented curriculum (as opposed to a test-driven, reading & math hyperfocused curriculum), she does not acknowledge that even the return to more varied, creative, and dialectic content & style can still perpetuate division if it's not intentionally anti-racist, anti-classist, anti-sexist, and so on. Similar to the ableism issue, I'm not sure if that's because she doesn't agree that that's true, it didn't work with the scope of the book, or perhaps some combination.

Everything considered, I still found the book to be very educational, and--again--a lovely reading experience, as far as the writing itself goes. I'd recommend it highly, with some caveats, to anyone wanting to learn more about education history and policy in the United States.