Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform »

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.

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. In Left 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 Back points the way to reviving American schools today.

Source: Simon & Schuster Last Updated: 05/07/2001
Last Sent to NetRead: 11/18/2007

Author Bio 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.

Gail Russell Chaddock - Christian Science Monitor

Diane Ravitch's latest—and best—history of education reform in the United States...could help frame the education debate for the twenty-first century.

Introduction

1. The Educational Ladder
2. A Fork in the Road
3. The Age of the Experts
4. IQ Testing: "This Brutal Pessimism"
5. Instead of the Academic Curriculum
6. On the Social Frontier
7. The Public Schools Respond
8. Dissidents and Critics
9. The Great Meltdown
10. The Sixties
11. In Search of Standards

Conclusion

Notes

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index