Volume 48, Number 3 · February 22, 2001
Schools: The Price of 'Progress'
By Alan Ryan
Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms
by Diane Ravitch
Simon and Schuster, 555 pp., $30.00
Diane Ravitch's clever, acerbic, and highly readable account of what she summarizes as 'a century of failed school reforms' will alienate many of her readers. That is not particularly distressing. What is distressing is that it may put off just those readers whom Diane Ravitch should be recruiting as her allies—those who share her wish that schools should be intellectually demanding as well as intellectually liberating, and that schools should demonstrate their democratic and egalitarian commitments not by lowering their standards for the badly off, but by treating the disadvantaged and underprivileged with the same unsentimental seriousness with which they treat the children of the better-off.
Review, 5064 words
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