Left Back: a Century of Battles Over School Reform

Radical Teacher, Spring, 2004 by Alan R. Sadovnik

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.