The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
Search in google:
Award-winning author, public intellectual, and former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch critiques a lifetime’s worth of school reforms and reveals the simple—yet difficult—truth about how we can create actual change in public schools The New York Times - Alan Wolfe Attending high school in Houston in the 1950s, Diane Ravitch came into contact with a teacher named Ruby Ratliff. A passionate lover of literature and a fierce editor of homework, Ratliff, following Tennyson, told Ravitch "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." The student evidently followed the teacher's advice. Ravitch, a historian of American education and assistant secretary of education under the first George Bush, has long sought to find out what makes schools work. She has now found what that is, or at least what it isn't: choice and testing. Her case against both is unyielding. Ravitch was lucky to have Ratliff as her teacher—and we are lucky to have Ravitch as ours.
