Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform (Paperback)

by Diane Ravitch (Author) "In the closing years of the nineteenth century, Americans prided themselves on their free public schools..." (more)
Key Phrases: Teachers College, United States, John Dewey (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
Richard Rothstein The New York Times An important new book. -- Review

Review
Alan Wolfe

The New Republic

Left Back is the most important book written in many decades about America's most important public institution.

Gail Russell Chaddock

The 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.

Joseph Adelson

The Wall Street Journal

Does much to convey what went wrong with the schools -- and what is still right about them.

Richard Rothstein

The New York Times

An important new book.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (July 31, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743203267
• ISBN-13: 978-0743203265
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #121,287 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #78 in

  Books > Nonfiction > Education > Education Theory > History

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Okay, better to think of this a history of progressivism, July 25, 2004

By	souldrummer (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews

I'm a math teacher, and I decided to read this book because I'd like to have some strong background on the history of school reform as I try to understand the national debate on policies such as No Child Left Behind. Also, I'm deeply interested in creative answers to the issue of democratically educating the Underclass. This book met some of my needs, but I can't give it an unqualified recommendation.

Really, Ravitch devotes most of her efforts to giving a history of Progressivism in education. Consdierable time is spent on Dewey, Kilpatrick, and their followers. The book starts around the time of Eliot's Committee of Ten Report detailing how all should receive a college preparatory education and discusses how progressivism chipped away at this democratic ideal. There is a little bit of respect for Progressivism's desire to make classroom less dependent on rote memorization. But Ravitch gives an accurate critique of Progressivsm's ultimate consequences: in an effort to make the child's experience the center of the classroom and the focus of learning, the academic content of the curriculum was diluted. Ravitch clearly holds Progressivism to be largely responsible for why our nation lags behind other nations in most international evaluations of school quality. I learned from this book that Progressivism's core concepts have remained the same under different rhetorical incarnations. I also learned that ultimately, Ravitch considers Progressivism to be antidemocratic because it made college preparatory content optional; only the children of elites or the most highly motivated students opted for the rigorous college preparatory track. For those immigrants and minorities who desperaely needed college to gain access to the American mainstream, Progressivism's goal to satisfy the desires of the students [but not their parents!] had tragic consequences.

I have a few criticisms of this book. I don't think that much original scholarship was done for this book. Cremin and Krug, two noted historians, are often referred to. I think Ravitch's emphasis is different than prior scholarship in that she gives more room for the opponents of Progressivism. But I don't know how much is new.

I'm really critical over the focus on the educational establishment. So much of this book describes rhetorical debate between proponents and critics of reforms in the educational schools. As a teacher, I know that much of what ed schools desire doesn't get put into practice. I wanted to hear more of the voices of the students and the teachers who were most affected by the reforms.

Lastly, for a book that claims to focus on "a century" of school reform, the 60s were covered too quickly for my tastes. Brown
v Board of Ed is not introduced until page 367 and it gets about 15 pages. The debate over school busing is barely mentioned. Charter school issues and school choice, a key complement to the standards movement of the 90s is also barely mentioned. These were some of the issues that I care most about. The relative lack of discussion on these areas reveals that Ravitch is more interested in Progressive curriculum reform than reform efforts in school structure [introduciton of junior high schools is an exception to this]. Also, for those who seek to understand contemporary debates, the last 20-30 years is covered in a rather cursory fashion.

This book was a quality discussion of Progressivism and how it hijacked democratic rhetoric for covert and overt antidemocratic ends. It falls short of being a total history of school reform and it misses a valuable opportunity to introduces more voices of teachers, parents, and students into the traditional histories that usually emphasize the debates in the ed schools and the history of the bureaucrats.

I learned some stuff, but wanted to learn a lot more.

3 stars

--SD

32 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must for those interested in the history of education!, October 11, 2002

By	Jose R. Vazquez (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

Once again, historian Diane Ravitch shows with great articulation how our educational system has failed our children under false pretenses. She illustrates how progressive movements and certain loud voices such as Dewey's and others have "dumbed down" our educational system.
This book is an eye-opener for those who have been misinformed by other sources. It vividly portrays how our students have been guinea pigs of educational fads which did not provide reasonable solutions to the problems they were attacking.
Kudos to Diane Ravitch for not being afraid to expose how education reforms have failed for over a hundred years.

26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good history of education in America, December 22, 2003

By	Henry Cate III (CA. United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.