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Diane Ravitch created quite a national stir when The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education came out last year in the United States. Here was a highly respected historian of American education publically recanting her previous advocacy of two main ideas shaping educational reform today: 1) the adoption of free market business practices to make schools more competitive, and 2) the use of standardized testing as the main assessment tool of student learning.
Dirk Windhorst (Sun,) studied this question.