Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms [Hardcover]

Diane Ravitch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 29, 2000

For the past one hundred years, Americans have argued and worried about the quality of their schools. Some have charged that students were not learning enough, while others have complained that the schools were not in the forefront of social progress. In this authoritative history of education in the twentieth century, historian Diane Ravitch describes this ongoing battle of ideas and explains why school reform has so often failed.

"Left Back" recounts grandiose efforts by education reformers to use the schools to promote social and political goals, even when they diminished the schools' ability to educate children. It shows how generations of reformers have engaged in social engineering, advocating such innovations as industrial education, intelligence testing, curricular differentiation, and life-adjustment education. These reformers, she demonstrates, simultaneously mounted vigorous campaigns against academic studies.

"Left Back" charges that American schools have been damaged by three misconceptions. The first is the belief that the schools can solve any social or political problem. The second is the belief that only a portion of youngsters are capable of benefiting from a high-quality education. The third is that imparting knowledge is relatively unimportant, compared to engaging students in activities and experiences.

These grave errors, Ravitch contends, have unnecessarily restricted equality of educational opportunity. They have dumbed down the schools by encouraging a general lowering of academic expectations. They have produced a diluted and bloated curriculum and pressure to enlarge individual schools so that they can offer multiple tracks to children withdifferent occupational goals. As a result, the typical American high school is too big, too anonymous, and lacks intellectual coherence.

Ravitch identifies several heroic educators -- such as William T. Harris, William C. Bagley, and Isaac Kandel -- who challenged these dominant and wrong-headed ideas. These men, dissidents in their own times, are usually left out of standard histories of education or treated derisively because they believed that all children deserved the opportunity to meet high standards of learning.

In describing the wars between competing traditions of education, Ravitch points the way to reviving American education. She argues that all students have the capacity to learn and that all are equally deserving of a solid liberal arts education. "Left Back" addresses issues of the utmost importance and urgency. It is a large work of history that by recovering the past illuminates a future.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Left Back, Diane Ravitch explodes pervasive myths of how American schools developed in the last hundred years: "The conventional story of the twentieth century told by historians of education is about the heroic advance of the progressive education movement, how it vanquished oppressive traditionalism in the classroom, briefly dominated American schools, then lost its vitality and withered away in the mid-1950s." Ravitch, herself an eminent historian of education and the author of The Great School Wars, calls this so much malarkey. She reveals how an endless wave of reforms prevented schools from doing what they were built to do: educate children. "Whenever the academic curriculum was diluted or minimized, large numbers of children were pushed through the school system without benefit of a genuine education," she writes. These words may not be welcome at teacher-training colleges, where so many of the ill-begotten theories and half-baked ideas she chronicles now percolate. But classroom veterans will appreciate Ravitch's insights: "What was sacrificed over the decades in which the schools were treated as vehicles for job training, social planning, political reform, social sorting, personality adjustment, and social efficiency was a clear definition of what schools can realistically and appropriately accomplish for children and for society."

The bulk of Left Back--and it is a bulky book, both in size (467 pages of text) and intellectual heft--is a history of progressive education reforms and the bad consequences that often follow them. Yet it is more than just history; Ravitch constantly keeps her eye on lessons the present can draw from the past, and isn't afraid to reach controversial conclusions, as when she writes, "If there is a lesson to be learned from the river of ink that was spilled in the education disputes of the twentieth century, it is that anything in education that is labeled a 'movement' should be avoided like the plague." Ravitch may add to that river of ink, but to everyone's benefit. Left Back is a fine book that should find a wide audience--the jacket features glowing blurbs from liberal historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and conservative author William J. Bennett. More important, it deserves a wide audience. --John J. Miller

From Publishers Weekly

HPlainly written and abundantly documented, this opinionated history of the "permanent debate" about school standards, curricula and methods should initiate new discussions about the purpose of American schools. Taking a firm stance in favor of liberal education, Ravitch argues that the ascent of so-called progressive education has undermined the intellectual development of students and the democratic principles of American society. For example, she writes that by the end of WW II, progressives had reserved academic education for an elite of college-bound students while they directed other children (mainly the poor, immigrants and racial minorities) toward undemanding vocational and general programs. In doing so, she argues, progressives "institutionalized white supremacy" and set a precedent for the present-day tracking of African-American students into vocational subjects. Ravitch depicts the century as falling into two halves, divided by the 1950s, when a sudden and concerted backlash against progressive ideas was sparked by teachers' and parents' resistance to education "experts," and she draws clear parallels between early-century ideas and contemporary trends. Along the way, she persuasively advocates a return to the "fundamental mission of teaching and learning" as the cure for the anti-intellectualism that ails American schools. Like The Closing of the American Mind, this is a personal crusade, but unlike Allan Bloom, Ravitch is anchored in a dispassionate history of the ways education has failed this country's children. Agent, Lyn Chu of Writers Representatives. Author tour. (Aug.) FYI: Ravitch served as assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education from 1991 to 1993.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; y First edition edition (August 29, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684844176
• ISBN-13: 978-0684844176
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #342,517 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 61 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Must-read for Educators, Education Policy Makers, Parents August 19, 2000

By Marilyn Keller Rittmeyer

I have personally known Brookings Institution education scholar Diane Ravitch for almost five years. She has become my most trusted adviser on education issues. We have debated frequently and disagree occasionally, but we are in complete agreement on the most important issue of all, the need to restore explicit and systematic instruction in American classrooms, at least as a choice for those educators and parents who fervently believe that traditional/classical education is best for children.

I have just completed reading her latest book, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, which is the culmination of a dozen years of research and writing. Although I am very knowledgeable about the history of the two opposing philosophies of education (progressivism vs. traditionalism/classicalism), Dr. Ravitch's book introduced new material to me on every page. This is a must-read book for all education professionals and education policy makers and I encourage parents to read this book so that they more fully understand the schools their children attend and the education their children are receiving.

The book provides detailed information about significant people throughout the 20th century who have influenced American education to this day. One thought-provoking chapter explains how leading progressivist John Dewey and project method advocate William Heard Kilpatrick were impressed with the progressive education in schools in the former Soviet Union in the early decades of the 20th century. Dr. Ravitch writes on page 209 that Dewey was convinced that "education was the key to social transformation, for he wrote repeatedly that the most significant aspect of the Russian Revolution was not political or economic but psychological, moral, and intellectual."

Another chapter explains the history of intelligence testing and how IQ scores have been used throughout the past century to prevent children from receiving an academic education. Another chapter discusses how a former Harvard president, James B. Conant, influenced the current state of high school education in America. Dr. Ravitch writes on page 364 that "Conant almost obsessively insisted that the schools must stand firm against parents who wanted their children to take academic courses even though they were not `academically talented.'...Counselors would have to be prepared to persuade `overambitious parents' that their child was not `academically talented.' To withstand `unreasonable parental pressures,' schools would have to insist upon `policy' - that is, a consistent bureaucratic defense of what was done and not done..."

Dr. Ravitch does identify problems that exist in American education, but her message is not a pessimistic one, but is a message of hope. By better understanding the history of American education in the past century, our American system of education will move forward in a positive direction for our children and our nation.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Masterwork by Eminent Historian of Education August 15, 2000

By A Customer

Since the death of Lawrence Cremin, Diane Ravitch has been the nation's premier education historian, especially adept at tracing and untangling the knotty history of philosophies, ideas and ideologies-and their influence on the policies and practices of our schools.

Left Back is her most important work yet, a magisterial account of the ideas-mostly bad ones-that for a century and more have persisted as the intellectual mainstream of the education profession, gushing forth from the ed schools and teacher colleges into hundreds of thousands of classrooms and touching the lives of tens of millions of children.

It is not, for the most part, a happy tale. It is more like a chronicle of folly, folly that has blindly and stubbornly persisted in the face of piles of research, tons of experience and oceans of common sense. Why and how it endured and spread and came to dominate the practice of education in America-to the immense disadvantage of our children, especially the neediest among them-is the main thrust of Left Back.

But this tale has heroes, too, men and women who swam against the stream's flow, who listened to common sense, heeded experience and paid attention to evidence. Their endurance in the face of heavy odds and sometimes heavy abuse is heartening to those in the year 2000 who persist in trying to revitalize American education despite the many forces arrayed against them.

Anyone who would understand how American education came to be the way it is needs to attend to the lessons imparted by this superb work of intellectual and educational history.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reform Speaks Truth! August 23, 2000

By A Customer

After over twenty-five years as a public school teacher/administator finally I am able to read something that speaks the truth! Ravitch's book is honest, thorough and refreshing. She has provided the reader with a detailed synthesis of the varied and many educational reforms of the past hundred years. She analyzes "the flavor of the month" reforms of the last century for what they really are - just another distraction; another diversion - that prevent the teacher from teaching. Bravo someone has finally told our story. Teachers read this book!