The Life And Death Of The Terrible Education Reform Movement
I’ve often thought, over these past eight years of following the politics of education, that one day this saga will make a great book. What I didn’t expect was that that one day would be today.
In ‘Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools’ (Knopf 2020, $27.95), education historian Diane Ravitch does the thing that she is best in the country at — taking a complex period of history in education and finding a way to turn it into a story with twists and turns worthy of great literature.
This book is like a sequel not to ‘Reign Of Error’ (2013) or even ‘The Death And Life Of The Great American School System’ (2010), but instead to the first book I had ever read by her, ‘Left Back: A Century Of Failed School Reforms’ (2000). In that book, as she does in this one, Ravitch methodically weaves her way through the people and events that shaped the conflicts of education policy. She is a master of brevity and I, as a pretty verbose blogger, marvel at how she can tell the story of such complex issues like the opt-out movement or the Massachusetts charter school ballot issue in just a few pages each. It’s like watching one of those artists who with a few simple seeming strokes of a pencil captures the essence CONTINUE READING: The Life And Death Of The Terrible Education Reform Movement | Gary Rubinstein's Blog