Left Back A Century of Battles over School Reform [Paperback]

For the past one hundred years, Americans have argued and worried about the quality of their schools. Some charged that students were not learning enough, while others complained that the schools were not furthering social progress. InLeft Back,education historian Diane Ravitch describes this ongoing battle of ideas and explains why school reform has so often disappointed. She recounts grandiose efforts to use the schools for social engineering, even while those efforts diminished the schools' ability to provide a high-quality education for all children. By illuminating the history of education in the twentieth century,Left Backpoints the way to reviving American schools today.Diane Ravitchis one of the nation's foremost historians of education and a leading education policy analyst. Her landmark books deeply influenced the national discussion of education standards in the 1980s and 1990s. She has been a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and at New York University. She served in the U.S. Department of Education as assistant secretary in charge of education research. She currently holds the Brown Chair in Education Studies at the Brookings Institution, editsBrookings Papers on Education Policy,and is a member of the National Assessment Governing Board. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.Chapter One: The Educational Ladder

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, Americans prided themselves on their free public schools. Most children attended the public schools, and Americans felt a patriotic attachment to them. Unlike Europe, which was burdened with rigid class barriers, in America it was believed that the public school could enable any youngster to rise above the most humble origins and make good on the nation's promise of equal opportunity for all. Oscar D. Robinson, the principal of the high school in Albany, New York, declared that the famous simile of the educational ladder, with its foot in the gulcš