Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform

This a wonderful book that should be read by everyone. You should read this book if you are curious as to why the education system produces ever-worse results; why graduates of colleges are semi-literate; why high school graduates cannot do elementary arithmetic; or why America cannot produce sufficient numbers of scientists. Who dislikes, no hates, this book? Teachers' unions, education school academics, the school administrators and the Department of Education Educrats who ride on the education gravy train, squandering billions upon billions on incompetent education theories. "Left Back" is a book that has earth shattering ramifications for the public debate on education and marks a turning point. The National Council on the Accreditation of Teacher Education, the UFT and the ideologues who dominate the education field will no longer have a field day destroying our nation's future. Please, please read this book. Read it for your children. Read it for your country's future. And read it to find out how your ever-higher taxes are squandered for junk education theories and quackery.

Ravich's book is sharp and focused. As an historian, Ravich has proven her skills time and again. As an educator, she brings the lens of history to a very close examination of how it all happened, all happened, all happened again and again. A more detailed history would certainly comprise a tome, but Ravich's intent, I surmise, is much more than a history lesson. She answers the questions most critical for substantive, sustained school reform: "How did this happen?" "Why did this happen?" "Where did we go wrong?" "Where did we go right?" and "Where do we start to fix this historical mistake called Progressivism?"I highly recommend this book to school principals faced with whole school reform and for executive educational administrators who have a deep and committed interest in success for all children. This is essential foundational reading for all educators engaged in instructional/school reform.

For the layman who is interested in gaining insight about the thinking, and decisions that have gone into educating our children, this book is an absolute must. For the uninitiated, who haven't a clue about where the ideas for educating our children came from, this book is the place to go.Diane Ravitch pulls no punches in this book. She goes right after the social engineers who tried to manipulate children into following a certain career path, instead of preparing them to face multiple choices. She does not believe that intelligence tests are the final arbiter of a childs ability to progress. In this book, I learned about the history and philosophies of leading educators, and the influence of their policies on education in this country. And I learned more about these issues than I had been taught in 16 years of public school and college.This book is a gold mine of information; and no, I don't know the author, nor am I being paid to write this. I just love this book!

Diane Ravitch's LEFT BACK is a triumph-her best book yet. America's foremost historian of education-knows how to write, how to think and think deeply. Ravitch has an Orwell-like integrity and clarity in her writing and she gives credit where it is due to great writers and educational theories of the "Progressive" non-traditional perspective such as Theodore R. Sizer, Deborah Meier and Howard Gardner. One has a very real sense while reading LEFT BACK that the Age of Dewey is being eclipsed by a rising new sun with a positive, intelligent vision for better schools for all the children. What is at stake is no less than the survival and success of our country, our civilization and our Democracy for as Ravitch compelling writes " the society that allows large numbers of its citizens to remain uneducated, ignorant or semi-literate squanders its greatest asset, the intelligence of its people" and "knowledge built up by the human race over many centuries {is} a precious heritage that must be taught to each succeeding generation in order for progress to continue."Ravitch's highly readable tale explains that the decline of American education in general and public schools in particular is a very real fact. Some of the blame, surely, is due to wrong-headed educational policies and an unwillingness by educational leaders to identify failures or to take responsibility for them. The Guru par excellence of American educational theory is the celebrated and almost universally praised John Dewey. Ravitch shows that this demigod of Progressive Education had feet of clay and a narrow vision. John Dewey dismissed critics who called for a defense of academic rigor as "reactionaries in politics and economics". Dewey's colleagues William Kilpatrick, George S. Counts and Boyd H. Bode had an even narrower vision. Yet these are the men who were leaders in the educational field in the first half of the twentieth century and whose works are still avidly studied and quoted in schools of education around the nation as if they were gospel, negative evidence from the real world notwithstanding. It is sobering to read of Kilpatrick demonizing the noble and wise Robert Maynard Hutchins as "stand{ing} near to Hitler" essentially because Hutchins held opposing views and was, at the same time( infuriatingly), a successful author and educator as President of the University of Chicago. It is sobering to read of Dewey's praise of the Soviet Union, and his reticence in opposing the `brutal pessimism" of educational "experts" like Lewis Tearman. Tearman, like many other devotees in the intelligence testing movement, perverted Alfred Binet's humanistic ideas and flirted with eugenics and xenophobia. Chillingly, Tearman even advocated poor Blacks and Hispanics " should not be allowed to reproduce." Ravitch details Tearman's popularity and influence in the educational field and his debates with the unsung William Bagley and the inde

Since the death of Lawrence Cremin, Diane Ravitch has been the nation's premier education historian, especially adept at tracing and untangling the knotty history of philosophies, ideas and ideologies-and their influence on the policies and practices of our schools.Left Back is her most important work yet, a magisterial account of the ideas-mostly bad ones-that for a century and more have persisted as the intellectual mainstream of the education profession, gushing forth from the ed schools and teacher colleges into hundreds of thousands of classrooms and touching the lives of tens of millions of children.It is not, for the most part, a happy tale. It is more like a chronicle of folly, folly that has blindly and stubbornly persisted in the face of piles of research, tons of experience and oceans of common sense. Why and how it endured and spread and came to dominate the practice of education in America-to the immense disadvantage of our children, especially the neediest among them-is the main thrust of Left Back. But this tale has heroes, too, men and women who swam against the stream's flow, who listened to common sense, heeded experience and paid attention to evidence. Their endurance in the face of heavy odds and sometimes heavy abuse is heartening to those in the year 2000 who persist in trying to revitalize American education despite the many forces arrayed against them.Anyone who would understand how American education came to be the way it is needs to attend to the lessons imparted by this superb work of intellectual and educational history.