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The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education |  | Author: Diane Ravitch
Publisher: Basic Books
List Price: $26.95
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Seller: treebeardbooks
Rating:  82 reviews
Sales Rank: 237
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 296
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0465014917
Dewey Decimal Number: 379.1
EAN: 9780465014910
ASIN: 0465014917
Publication Date: March 2, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A passionate plea to preserve and renew public education, The Death and Life of the Great American School System is a radical change of heart from one of America’s best-known education experts.
Diane Ravitch—former assistant secretary of education and a leader in the drive to create a national curriculum—examines her career in education reform and repudiates positions that she once staunchly advocated. Drawing on over forty years of research and experience, Ravitch critiques today’s most popular ideas for restructuring schools, including privatization, standardized testing, punitive accountability, and the feckless multiplication of charter schools. She shows conclusively why the business model is not an appropriate way to improve schools. Using examples from major cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, and San Diego, Ravitch makes the case that public education today is in peril.
Ravitch includes clear prescriptions for improving America’s schools: - leave decisions about schools to educators, not politicians or businessmen
- devise a truly national curriculum that sets out what children in every grade should be learning
- expect charter schools to educate the kids who need help the most, not to compete with public schools
- pay teachers a fair wage for their work, not “merit pay” based on deeply flawed and unreliable test scores
- encourage family involvement in education from an early age
The Death and Life of the Great American School System is more than just an analysis of the state of play of the American education system. It is a must-read for any stakeholder in the future of American schooling.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 82
 a must read July 29, 2010
walker/lea
Finally, a voice of reason comes out of the mess we are creating. Educate yourself, read this book. Share it with everyone around you.
Intriguing and Informative, Regardless of Your Political Stance July 20, 2010
Daniel Murphy (Redmond, OR USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
To start this review off in a moderately inflammatory way, I'll mention that I first heard of Diane Ravitch's new book when the head of the teacher's union in my school district recommended that the school board (which I'm on) read it. Our school district, which considers itself innovative, has seized upon many of the in vogue ideas that claim to promote student success and achievement: small school initiatives, charter schools, proficiency based learning, data driven teaching, amongst others. Here in Oregon, we are facing the duel specters of the worst financial crisis in the last seventy years, and the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law grinding its inexorable way towards the consequences of setting laudable, but unachievable goals.
A bit of my background that may help frame my comments: I'm a family physician that raised four children (all now adults) with my wife. My wife has been a teacher since 1974, teaching (and loving) middle school for the last 15 years. I come from a conservative background, moderately paranoid of the intentions of unions, pro-innovation, and thoroughly frustrated with the expense and mediocrity of public education. I'm not someone to just complain and criticize from a distance, though: I've been a hard-working school board member for over six years. I've learned a lot. Diane Ravitch's book taught me a whole lot more, much of which I didn't want to know. I'm the better for it.
Ravitch doesn't unleash a focused salvo in her book, instead marshalling a more broad-based reexamination of some enormously popular (with politicians, the public, and business interests) concepts in public education. They also happened to be concepts very popular with me: teacher pay linked to performance, charter schools, consequences for schools, teachers, principals if they don't meet performance goals, data driven education based on test scores.
Ravitch is neither a reactionary, nor a radical. Though she has worked at a variety of highly influential jobs in education, her specialty is the history of education. All of us know what those who don't know history are doomed to do, and it behooves even skeptics (not just skeptical school board members) to turn an attentive ear to what is carefully laid out in The Death and Life of the Great American Education System.
It would be wrong, in this review, to take sides on the issues that Ravitch addresses. It isn't that I don't have opinions (my fellow school board members would howl at that notion), but that voicing them would detract from what I'd like others to know about this book. What I would like to hook a potential reader of this book with is this notion: whether you are an ardent supporter or a bitter opponent of charter schools, pay for performance, NCLB, rigid focus on the basics (reading, writing, math), you will turn the last past page of this book with a far more informed and thoughtful perspective than you had when you turned the first page.
And turn those pages you will, because if a non-fiction book about education can possibly be a page turner, this is the best candidate yet for that designation. It is not an overstatement to say that some of the history that Ravitch recounts about the upheavals in education that have occurred in New York, San Diego, Washington D.C., as well as the results of several billion dollars in grants by organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is gripping, even a bit mind-bending. Ravitch's careful walk through what the press SAID was happening during these upheavals, versus the actual cold hard facts that emerged when all the dust from the tornadoes of hype and opinion surrounding them settled to the ground, is instructive to all conservatives and liberals that lay claim to having an open mind.
My wife, the middle school teacher, says that one of her goals with every student is to make them into a lifelong learner. All of us that are interested in public education should aspire to that same goal for ourselves. Ravitch's approach to what she perceives as ailing in education is a finely crafted and highly personal one, personal enough that few readers are likely to find themselves in complete agreement with her. What almost every reader will acknowledge, though, by the end of the book is that their perspective has been broadened, and their understanding of the issues has been deepened. It is not too often that a book forms a bridge between a school board member and the head of the teacher's union, but this one is capable of doing so (and did).
Amazing.... July 17, 2010
Luckyflame 13 (Somewhere in Texas)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I have been an HISD substitute teacher and I also have a child in HISD public schools. I truly was beginning to despair that anyone outside the teaching profession or who did not have a child currently in public schools, understood what was happening---that the chasm was too wide and there would never be anyone else who could empathize or comprehend our situation.
Dr. Ravitch understands. She gets it. I couldn't put down this book. Every sentence, every page is full of affirmations of what I am seeing on a daily basis. And I was just seeing the smaller puzzle pieces, not the bigger picture. Dr. Ravitch has provided the context to my questions.
Thanks to Dr. Ravitch for this book. I hope everyone and anyone involved in U.S. education, picks up her book and reads it. And it is a well-written book as well--Dr. Ravitch is the product of HISD from the past days when critical thinking and analysis were supremely important. May those days return soon!
We Need to be Very Worried July 11, 2010
Jim Moore (Alexandria, VA USA)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
We're in trouble...big trouble...that starts with T, which rhymes with D, and that stands for Diane. Diane Ravitch has done it again. Painted a picture of a very bleak future for American education if our communities, parents, teachers, and credentialed education leaders don't wrest control of our schools back from the pseudo-government bodies, foundations, and entrepreneurs whose plans to "improve" education begin and end with their bank accounts or their publicists' bank accounts.
Diane, with whom I had the pleasure of working at the Department of Education under Lamar Alexander, takes on the "teach-to-the-testers" of the No Child Left Behind Act, and the muddle-headed quasi-educators who, unworried about their lack of actual education credentials, are wreaking havoc on our schools, from New York to San Diego. Where once America's school teachers were actually imparting knowledge about math, English, geography, history, the arts and sciences, and music, now only math and English seem to garner any interest from the reformers who are dismantling schools at a clip as nearly as rapid as a machine gun on full auto. Segregation in our schools is alive and well, though disguised under a variety of rubrics meant to distract communities from the troubling intent of reformers who cherry pick the best students, put them in schools tailored to their abilities, and leave the students who don't measure up to corporate standards to fend for themselves in left-behind schools.
Who is losing? Our children and our communities--along with our country's potential to be competitive in today's and tomorrow's global marketplace of ideas, products, services, and security. Dr. Ravitch's book is filled with neon-light-bright warnings of a nation again at risk of failure to educate. Read this one, and then take action.
Finally! July 9, 2010
Barbara Walls
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Finally, someone has spoken and conveyed the pith of complex issues in education. Ravitch directly addresses the realities of political panaceas: vouchers, charters, the Gates Foundation's "Everyone is College Material", No Child Left Behind, and even the newest red herring---Race to the Top. This is the most intelligent work on education I've read in twenty-five years. I read it in hardback in March, but will order the Kindle version because I want it in my electronic library.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 82
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