Left Back: a Century of Battles Over School Reform.

LEFT BACK: A CENTURY OF BATTLES OVER SCHOOL REFORM

By Diane Ravitch. Simon and Schuster, 2000.

Diane Ravitch's Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform is in effect a popular version of her The Troubled Crusade (1983), which placed the blame on what is wrong with U.S. education squarely on the shoulders of progressive educational reformers. Now, with little new added and much left out, she retells her story of our educational history as the triumph of social goals over intellectual goals, and a resulting decline of standards. As before, she combines a liberal concern with equity and a conservative attack on (as she sees it) the destruction of the traditional humanist curriculum and the intellectual foundations of schooling. She also turns the radical critique of public education back against itself, agreeing with its argument that schooling in the United States has failed to provide equality of opportunity for all children, especially for poor children and children of color, but blaming progressive reforms themselves for perpetuating inequality. Unfortunately, rather than a nuanced analysis of this thesis, the reader gets a simple moral tale: school reformers opposing the traditional academic curriculum are villains those who favor it are heroes.

There is a good deal for liberals and radicals to agree with in Left Back. Ravitch's argument that public school progressives distorted Dewey's progressivism throughout the twentieth century is on target. Her critique of life-adjustment education, social efficiency education, tracking, and vocational education, as responsible for denying African-American and working class children access to an academic curriculum partly explains how it is that have helped reproduce inequality from one generation to the next. However, she ignores decades worth of sociological research (with the exception of James Coleman) showing educational inequality's causes to lie both within and outside the schools. If the reformers that Ravitch champions had won, and the academic functions of schooling had remained primary, there Is no reason to suppose that educational inequality would have been eliminated, or even that our society would now be more of a meritocracy. It is just bad history to imply that a goal of curriculum traditionalists was to eliminate educational inequality, or to assume that their leadership would have prevented a more European version of academic and vocational tracking from occurring.

Ravitch does say she wishes all children had the education hers received at a progressive private school in New York City, Dalton, with its curriculum history and literature, and with great teachers who made ideas come alive. She argues, like Dewey in Experience in Education (1938), that the best progressive schools rejected simplistic either-ors and combined content and process, intellectual and child-centered functions, to offer wonderful education. She supports the critique that S. F. Semel and I made of private, child-centered, progressive schools: they serve an overwhelmingly white and affluent student population, while progressive education in public rarely offers the same opportunities to poor and non-white kids (Semel and Sadovnik, 1999). It is a long leap, however, to assume that if critics of progressive education such as Isaac Kandel, William Bagley, Hyman Rickover and Arthur Bestor had been triumphant, public education would have produced schools like Dalton, or like Dewey's Laboratory School at the University of Chicago. Additionally, she ignores sociological research on progressive education's class origins, which shows why the progressive schools she praises have almost exclusively served white affluent students (Bernstein, 1990; Sadovnik, 1991).

Ravitch does believe that the history of U.S. education is one part of a larger battle between progressives and conservatives; but her story of conflict focuses rather narrowly on education. The key players are professors of education (mainly at Teachers College); professional groups such as the Progressive Education Association; and other academics. There is little mention of the business and political elites who have played a critical role in shaping educational policy. For example, the standards movement initiated by A Nation at Risk in 1983 responded in large measure to business leaders who believed that Japanese and German economic superiority at the time owed to their superior educational systems. The subsequent adoption of state and national standards and the launching of reform projects such as G.H. Bush's America 2000, Bill Clinton's Goals 2000, and G.W. Bush's No Child Left Behind have resulted from a complex interaction of political, social, economic, cultural and ideological forces, with professors of education playing a far less significant role than economic, political and organizational elites.

Moreover, the last thirty years of educational reform are best seen, not as exclusively the story of traditional content versus (progressive) process, but rather as a battle over the schooling produced by a century of democratization. For defenders of the traditional curriculum like Ravitch, the extension of free K-12 schooling to all has meant a lowering of standards and watering down of the older humanist curriculum. For business elites, it has meant the decline of skills and a decline in productivity. For poor parents, it has meant the continued failure of public schools, especially in cities. So the polities of reform have made strange bedfellows, with religious conservatives business elites, and African-American educators and legislators such as (in Milwaukee) Howard Fuller and Polly Williams, all supporting school vouchers, albeit from very different premises. It is no accident that academics favoring vouchers have had considerable economic underwriting from the Bradley and Heritage Foundations, the Walton family, and other conservative sources, while opposition to vouchers has come, in part, from teacher unions defending their own claims about the value of public education. Ravitch's villain-and-hero story misses too many of the actors and their political aims.

For her, the primary function of schooling is to cultivate intellect. This essentialist view leads her to underemphasize and, at times, ignore schooling's economic functions. Implicit in her analysis, however, is an economically functionalist view: that academic skills learned from a traditional curriculum are the best preparation for the new information economy. She does not acknowledge that the number of low-paying service jobs requiring no higher education has grown, while the number of high-paying, mind-work jobs is declining, with the aid of globalization and new technologies. Ravitch's failure to understand the relationship between political economy and education (or her willingness to ignore it completely) leads her to simplify and so falsify our educational history.

She also gives scant treatment to Brown v. Board of Education, to desegregation in general, and to the progressive agenda of reducing the achievement gap and providing equality of opportunity. The Troubled Crusade dedicated a full chapter to Brown and another to race and social science. Left Back has four pages on Brown and one page on Head Start. Ravitch devotes little or no attention to other important court decisions, such as Abbott v. Burke in New Jersey, which has resulted in the most comprehensive system of finance and educational reforms for urban districts in the U.S. In focusing exclusively on how progressive educational reformers have supposedly reduced academic quality, she ignores their essential role in seeking legal and policy remedies for unequal educational opportunity, democratizing access to higher education, and fighting for social justice. Our educational system in 2003 is more open to African-American students than it was in 1954, although we still have a long way to go. Without the progressive attack on educational inequality, it is not clear that whatever progress we have made would have occurred.

Finally, Ravitch gives little attention to today's most important ideological battle in education: that over school choice and especially over publicly funded tuition vouchers for private and religious schools. The proponents of vouchers have skillfully borrowed Ravitch's ostensibly progressive attack on public education, arguing that the public schools have failed low-income African-American students in central cities, such as Milwaukee and Cleveland--where vouchers in fact have been implemented and upheld by court decisions. The choice debate has been a heated one for the last decade. It would be interesting to know how she regards these victories of her argument.

In her conclusion Ravitch argues for a more balanced combination of the best of traditional and progressive education, and praises usually opposing educational reformers: for instance, E.D. Hirsch on the one hand, and Theodore Sizer and Deborah Meier on the other. At a time when the assessment demands made by No Child Left Behind and by high stakes testing at the state level threaten to make Meier's vision and achievements at Central Park East difficult or impossible to preserve, a balanced perspective is vital. Unfortunately, Ravitch has little to say about a standards movement that calls for a one-size-fits-all model of testing, and results in what the British have called the "name and shame" game.

The recently released paperback edition of Left Back significantly changes its subtitle, from A Century of Failed School Reforms to A Century of Battles Over School Reform. Unfortunately, Ravitch has not changed her argument correspondingly. She still blames progressive ideas and movements, for what she still sees as a century of failed reform. Moreover, she fails to acknowledge here, as she did in The Troubled Crusade, the impact progressives had in opening opportunities to groups previously denied equal access to school and college.

If you think, as I do, that educational reform should create schools that teach students the basic skills and knowledge necessary in a technological society--where students have the opportunity to develop their emotional, spiritual, moral, and creative lives; where concern and respect for others is a guiding principle; where caring, cooperation and community are stressed; where students from different social classes, races, genders, and ethnic groups have equality of opportunity; and where inequalities of class, race, gender and ethnicity are substantially reduced (Sadovnik, Cookson & Semel, 2001: 523-24)--don't expect to approach these goals by restoring the academic curriculum of an imagined golden age.

REFERENCES

Bernstein, B. (1990). Social Class and Pedagogic Practice. 63-93 in B. Bernstein, The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse: Volume 114, Class, Codes and Control London: Routledge.

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and Education. New York: MacMillan.

Ravitch, D. (1983). The Troubled Crusade. New York: Basic Books.

Sadovnik, A.R. (1991). Basil Bernstein's Theory of Pedagogic Practice: A Structuralist Approach. Sociology of Education (special issue on curriculum), Volume 64, Number 1: 48-63.

Sadovnik, A.R.; Cookson, Jr., PW. and Semel, S.F. (1994; 2001). Exploring Education: An Introduction to the Foundations of Education (Second Edition) Allyn and Bacon.

Semel, S.F. and Sadovnik, A.R. (1999). "Schools of Tomorrow, "Schools of Today: What Happened to Progressive Education. Peter Lang Publishers.