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Title: Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform by Diane Ravitch ISBN: 0-7432-0326-7 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 01 August, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.2 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Educational Reform: Start Here!
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: A good history of education in America
Comment: This book does a good job of covering the last hundred years of the debate about education in America. A seemly simple question has been at the root of this debate: "What is the purpose of education?"
Through the 1800s for most teachers the answer was to teach children how to read, write, and do arithmetic. This was called the academic curriculum. By the late 1800s there was almost universal schooling.
Starting in the early 1900s, some education leaders thought it was best to prepare children for the job market, and especially once the IQ tests become popular, children were tested and slotted for a college track, or other tracks, as early at age six and seven. Some people pushed to improve self-esteem as the only real goal of education. Additionally many leaders of education started seeing schools as a place to "improve" society, and they wanted to go behind the backs of the parents and mold the children.
Over the years there has been a wide variety of programs, some of which have been a bit useful or effective, most have been destructive. For example in the 1920s and 1930s there was a push to be efficient in education, and that by figuring out where children would be working as adults and giving them only the education they would need, the schools could be good use of resources. There was a belief by some of the experts that students had little ability to transfer knowledge. As an extreme example of what this belief mean, just because students had been taught the basics of addition, they would have to learn from scratch the basics of subtraction. Because of this belief there was little interest in teaching children more than they really "needed" to know.
The questions people asked about the purpose of education are good questions to ask. It is helpful to know why children are going to schools. The author clearly feels that many of the leaders of education make big mistakes, and millions of children have suffered from an inadequate education. For example many people in the 1950s and 1960s felt that black children would grow up to have the menial jobs, so it was best to only teach them the basics; that it would be bad to try and force them to learn more than they would ever use.
And on the flip side, in the 1980s many experts felt that self-esteem was the only thing that matter, once children had good self-esteem, they would learn what they needed to know. So there were whole programs designed to help children have a strong positive self-image. Out of these schools came large numbers of children with little knowledge, but they felt good about themselves.
The author mentions program after program that were inflicted on children. The author goes over some of the various types of damage the children suffered. Then a group of education leaders would come up with a new program, lead another national movement, and a new group of children would suffer.
This is a good book for anyone who is trying to understand the current set of problems schools in our nation are facing. One of the fascinating things is how many of today's proposals have been tried in the past, and sometimes they have been tried several times.
Rating: 1
Summary: Without reference, merit, or scholarship
Comment: I read this book and others including Tinkering Towards Utopia (Tyack and Cuban, Elusive Science (Lagemann), Teaching in America (Grant and Murray), and Reconstrucing American Education (Katz). I strongly recommend all of these other texts, but NOT this one. Out of nearly sixty books I've read for my qualifying exams -- I can easily say this one was a loss and waste of time.
Ravitch's book is a poorly written history. It foremost displays a lack of significant understanding of existing literature in history of education and American history. In particular she shows an absolute misunderstanding of the development of progressive thinking as can be found more clearly in Tyack and Hansot's Managers of Virtue. She clearly mis-interprets John Dewey's philosophy, place in American philosophy and thinking, and most certainly his role in education.
In short it reads like the USA Today version of American history. Inaccurate, misleading, poorly researched, etc.
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Title: The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn by Diane Ravitch ISBN: 0375414827 Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Pub. Date: 15 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: BEYOND THE CLASSROOM by Laurence, Ph.D. Steinberg, B. Bradford Brown, Sanford M. Dornbusch ISBN: 0684835754 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 01 October, 1997 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them by E. D. Hirsch, E.D. Hirsch ISBN: 0385495242 Publisher: Anchor Books/Doubleday Pub. Date: 17 August, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: No More Ritalin: Treating Adhd Without Drugs by Mary Ann Block ISBN: 1575661268 Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 01 August, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves but Can't Read, Write, or Add by Charles J. Sykes ISBN: 0312148232 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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