Reign of Error
2013 • 396 pages
Ratings3
Average rating3.7
15
Ratings3
Average rating3.7
From one of the foremost authorities on education in the United States, former U.S. assistant secretary of education, an incisive, comprehensive look at today’s American school system that argues against those who claim it is broken and beyond repair; an impassioned but reasoned call to stop the privatization movement that is draining students and funding from our public schools. In a chapter-by-chapter breakdown she puts forth a plan for what can be done to preserve and improve our public schools. She makes clear what is right about U.S. education, how policy makers are failing to address the root causes of educational failure, and how we can fix it.
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Diane Ravitch's fiery assault on the so-called “school reform” movement. The book can be broadly divided into two primary sections. The first section addresses, individually, various myths about public education, and attempts to debunk them one at a time. The second lays out her proposed solutions.
The approach is sound, but the execution is not without problems. One of them resolves itself – I often found myself thinking that Ravitch had been making an assertion for quite a while with no evidence to support it. Typically the evidence did come a bit later, so if you find yourself unconvinced, you might give her a bit longer to make her case. She's also frequently repetitive.
One consistently discouraging observation is that her proposed solutions are vanishingly unlikely to be enacted, as things stand now. Pipe dreams are unsatisfying. But Ravitch is an education researcher, not a political strategist, and can hardly be faulted for that.
Nota bene: This book seems longer than it is, so much so that I got antsy wondering how it could possibly be padded out so long with the remaining material to be covered. As it turns out, it isn't – the back 30% is appendices and footnotes.
