Book of the week: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch

(Basic, 288 pages, $26.95)

Diane Ravitch’s new book is shredding a hard-won national consensus about how to repair America’s failing schools, said Sara Mosle in Slate.com. The respected scholar has become convinced that two reform ideas that she helped push into the mainstream—charter schools and standardized testing—are destroying public education. Like his Republican predecessor, President Obama has often championed these methods as a way to hold teachers and principals accountable. Ravitch, who embraced both as assistant secretary of education under the first President Bush, has decided that the results are abysmal. The common flaw in both approaches, Ravitch says, is arrogance. Her detail-packed condemnation of their consequences “arrives with the force of the Pentagon Papers.”

My old ally is right to be disheartened by the failures of reform, said Chester E. Finn Jr. in Forbes.com. One study has found that for every good charter school created, two bad ones get funding, too. No Child Left Behind, the centerpiece of George W. Bush’s education initiative, reduced the art of teaching to mere “test cramming and bean counting.” The solution to these failures, though, is more radical reform—not retreat. Ravitch now opposes not just charter schools but also any practice that provides financial incentives for schools or teachers based on test scores. She calls for a return to the “great American school system” of her youth—forgetting that her beloved neighborhood schools long ago had become academic “death traps for America’s neediest youngsters.”

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True, Ravitch provides too few solutions, said Richard D. Kahlenberg in The Washington Monthly. But her book asks the right questions, and “comes at just the right time.” Today, most successful charter schools simply skim the best students from traditional schools. Meanwhile, every public school faces an absurd federal deadline requiring that 100 percent of its students be proficient in math and reading by 2014—though President Obama may lift that restriction. Ravitch blames much wrongheaded thinking on private foundations established by Bill Gates, the Sam Walton family, and others, which fundamentally misunderstand taxpayer-funded public schools. Her “bracing and courageous” critique should yank those dreamers back to earth.