Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms

Nearly twentyfive years ago Diane Ravitch stunned those familiar with the historiography of American education by publishing a devastating critique of revisionist scholarship in the field. In The Revisionists Revised: A Critique of the Radical Attack on the Schools (1978) she rebuked Michael B. Katz, Clarence J. Karier, and Joel Spring, among others, for oversimplifying, distorting, and politicizing America's educational past. She accused them of present ism and urged all historians of education “to abandon the simplistic search for heroes and devils, for scapegoats and panaceas.” The author and editor of many important books on American education in the intervening years, Ravitch has now produced Left Back, a preachy volume that unfortunately exhibits all the faults that she once attributed to the so called revisionists. Left Back tells the story of American educational reform in the twentieth century, characterizing it as the wholesale triumph of “progressive” reforms that were,...