Left Back A Century of Battles over School

For the past one hundred years, Americans have argued and worried about the quality of their schools. Some charged that students were not learning enough, while others complained that the schools were not furthering social progress. InLeft Back,education historian Diane Ravitch describes this ongoing battle of ideas and explains why school reform has so often disappointed. She recounts grandiose efforts to use the schools for social engineering, even while those efforts diminished the schools' ability to provide a high-quality education for all children. By illuminating the history of education in the twentieth century,Left Backpoints the way to reviving American schools today.

Diane Ravitch is one of the nation's foremost historians of education and a leading education policy analyst. Her landmark books deeply influenced the national discussion of education standards in the 1980s and 1990s. She has been a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and at New York University. She served in the U.S. Department of Education as assistant secretary in charge of education research. She currently holds the Brown Chair in Education Studies at the Brookings Institution, edits Brookings Papers on Education Policy, and is a member of the National Assessment Governing Board. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Contents

Introduction

The Educational Ladder
A Fork in the Road
The Age of the Experts
IQ Testing: "This Brutal Pessimism"
Instead of the Academic Curriculum
On the Social Frontier
The Public Schools Respond
Dissidents and Critics
The Great Meltdown
The Sixties
In Search of Standards

Conclusion
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

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Left Back A Century of Battles over School Reform

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials