Will the Billionaires Destroy Public Education?
The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education 3rd Edition
This link will take you to the opening pages of the revised “Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” The book was originally published in 2010. It became a surprise national bestseller.
The publisher at Basic Books, Lara Heimert, invited me to lunch a year ago and made an unusual offer. She said that I could revise the book any way I wanted. This was an extraordinary offer. Publishers usually warn you not to add or subtract unless you keep the line count exactly the same. They want to avoid the expense of resetting the entire book. But I was offered the opportunity to change, add, delete as I wished. It was an offer I could not refuse.
The two big changes I made were these:
I removed my long-standing support for national standards and tests in light of the Common Core debacle.
Second, I revised my estimation of the 1983 report, “A Nation at Risk,” which gave rise to the myth that American education was broken.
I hope you will take the time to read this new edition. It reflects much of what I have learned from YOU on this blog over the past four years.
