The Death and Life of the Great American School System: RAVITCH UPDATES BEST SELLING BOOK ON ED REFORM
BY VALERIE STRAUSS | WASHINGTON POST/ANSWER SHEET BLOG | HTTP://WAPO.ST/SKBNRM
11/03/2011 6:30 AM ET - Critics of Diane Ravitch like to say that the education historian talks a lot about what is wrong with the modern school reform movement but doesn’t offer solutions about how to fix anything. Historians, of course, by definition spend their time looking to the past, not making policy pronouncements about what should be. That said, Ravitch, the leading voice in the country speaking out against standardized-test based school reform, does what her critics say she doesn’t in an important new chapter at the end of the new paperback edition of the best-selling “The Death and Life of the Great American School System.”No doubt those critics still won’t like what she has to say.
The subtitle of Ravitch’s book — selected as the most important education book of the last decade by readers of Education Next, a magazine