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A review by gregbrown
The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch
4.0
The first edition of this now-revised book feels canonical because it was one of the leading works to argue against the "education reform" agenda, especially during a time when the ed-reform agenda captured two sequential presidential administrations on opposite sides of the bench. However, Ravitch is too held-back by her centrism to really make a sweeping case against the impulses here.
Sure, there's lots of damning details, along with a methodical disassembly of specific claims so thorough that she repeats each point for what feels like dozens of times. (This book really needed strong prose and a stronger edit.) But Ravitch largely holds back from tying the conclusions to any sort of ideological diagnosis, except in ways that are deeply unsatisfying, and which makes her actual suggestions for improvements kind of half-hearted.
For example, she correctly notes in several places that poverty and inequality account for much of the differences in educational advancement. But it seems to have taken her until 2015 to suspect that education reformers were purposely focusing on accountability, testing, teacher ranking, and other changes as a way of avoiding confronting actual poverty! More strangely, her suggestions for combating the problem are milquetoast junk like prenatal care—undoubtedly important, but so out of proportion with the scope of the problem that it makes me wonder whether Ravitch really gets it. She seems to operate on a scope of policy roughly bordered by Clinton on the left, and Romney on the right, which robs you of any programs for fixing the systemic problems she addresses.
So instead, we get a focus on litigating specific claims and bouncing around between threads that leads to muddy writing and a book that feels padded out at only 300 pages. Even worse, parts don't seem to relate to each other as a suggestion in one section can be contradicted by a proposal in another. For example, Ravitch rightly points out that the inequality in school funding is a moral disaster; more affluent school populations receiving more resources is so regressive as to be appalling. But at the same time, Ravitch wants to maintain and even strengthen local control and local funding of schools—steps that would enshrine and embolden those very school spending differences!
These contradictions and missteps lead to a work that feels like it's debunking a lot of ed reform writing—especially the ed reform writing at the time of original publication in 2010—but doesn't really function well as a polemic or even as a coherent book. Was it a worthwhile read? Yeah, sure. But was it a necessary one? Nah. Read Ravitch's articles for the NY Review of Books and you'll get the gist. Or read some more leftist critiques—such as Class War or The New Prophets of Capital, for example—for a better diagnosis of the problems we face and solutions we need.
Sure, there's lots of damning details, along with a methodical disassembly of specific claims so thorough that she repeats each point for what feels like dozens of times. (This book really needed strong prose and a stronger edit.) But Ravitch largely holds back from tying the conclusions to any sort of ideological diagnosis, except in ways that are deeply unsatisfying, and which makes her actual suggestions for improvements kind of half-hearted.
For example, she correctly notes in several places that poverty and inequality account for much of the differences in educational advancement. But it seems to have taken her until 2015 to suspect that education reformers were purposely focusing on accountability, testing, teacher ranking, and other changes as a way of avoiding confronting actual poverty! More strangely, her suggestions for combating the problem are milquetoast junk like prenatal care—undoubtedly important, but so out of proportion with the scope of the problem that it makes me wonder whether Ravitch really gets it. She seems to operate on a scope of policy roughly bordered by Clinton on the left, and Romney on the right, which robs you of any programs for fixing the systemic problems she addresses.
So instead, we get a focus on litigating specific claims and bouncing around between threads that leads to muddy writing and a book that feels padded out at only 300 pages. Even worse, parts don't seem to relate to each other as a suggestion in one section can be contradicted by a proposal in another. For example, Ravitch rightly points out that the inequality in school funding is a moral disaster; more affluent school populations receiving more resources is so regressive as to be appalling. But at the same time, Ravitch wants to maintain and even strengthen local control and local funding of schools—steps that would enshrine and embolden those very school spending differences!
These contradictions and missteps lead to a work that feels like it's debunking a lot of ed reform writing—especially the ed reform writing at the time of original publication in 2010—but doesn't really function well as a polemic or even as a coherent book. Was it a worthwhile read? Yeah, sure. But was it a necessary one? Nah. Read Ravitch's articles for the NY Review of Books and you'll get the gist. Or read some more leftist critiques—such as Class War or The New Prophets of Capital, for example—for a better diagnosis of the problems we face and solutions we need.