Left Back: a Century of Battles Over School Reform

Radical Teacher, Spring, 2004 by Alan R. Sadovnik

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.