How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (Hardcover)







Authors Diane Ravitch

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Product Description
In The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane Ravitch examines her career in education reform, and repudiates positions that she once fiercely defended. Evaluating broadly popular ideas for restructuring schools, she explains why they have had no positive impact on the quality of American education.

Ravitch reconsiders the evolution of her own views on key issues and reveals her skepticism regarding charter schools, privatization, accountability, and the philanthropists who are trying to control school reform using business models for school planning.

Drawing on over forty years of research and observation on education, Ravitch also offers prescriptions for improving our schools. A passionate plea to promote the survival of public education, The Death and Life of the Great American School System represents a radical change of heart from one of America’s best-known education experts. It is a must-read for anyone—teachers, parents, administrators, and bureaucrats—invested in the future of our schools.

Product Details
# Hardcover: 296 pages
# Publisher: Basic Books

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Reviews How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education


With the courage of character and the understanding gained from years of both scholarly and government experience, she asks the simple question, "What works?" She takes a good hard look at the various paths followed by school reformers--policymakers, business leaders, foundations, and government--with their various emphases on markets, accountability and incentives, testing, charter schools, and voucher plans. These attempts, largely structural and managerial, have failed to address what Ravitch has come to see and convinces us her readers is the cornerstone of education in a democracy--the public school system that holds us all together in a common culture. Its subject matter, history and civics, literature and the arts, has been all but lost in the frenzy of test preparation that has taken over classrooms everywhere in the country.

Ravitch makes an illuminating case as she uses the experience of New York City to show how political aims trump real learning when test scores are used as indicators of educational progress by leaders looking to their own reputations as they misrepresent the meaning of the numbers that hide what really matters--what students are learning. Yes, it's the curriculum, stupid.