Ravitch, Diane. (2000). Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. Reviewed by John L. Rury, DePaul University

Ravitch, Diane. (2000). Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. New York: Simon and Schuster. 555 pp. $ 30.00 (Cloth)     ISBN 0684844176 Reviewed by John L. Rury DePaul University July 10, 2001 Related review The Irony of Revising Revisionism: Diane Ravitch on Twentieth Century School Reform In 1978 Diane Ravitch published a sweeping critique of the so-called revisionist historians, titled The Revisionists Revised. In the book's final chapter, titled “Summing Up: Limitations of the Ideological Approach,” she lambasted these scholars for being irresponsible, and particularly for “politicizing” their historical writing. “Politicization has many risks,” she wrote, “the greatest of which is that it frequently forces a telescoping and distortion of the past for the sake of explaining the present. The presentist method involves projecting one's own ideas onto the past in search of the seeds of present problems. The more passionate the seeker, the likelier he is to treat the past as a great precursor of the great goodness or great evil of the present, rather than on its own terms. While present day problems obviously have their origins in the past, the historical inquiry must be informed by a respect for the importance of context. Nothing that exists today has precisely the same meaning that it had a century ago; the perceptions of the 1970s are not the same as those of other eras.” (p. 165) Sentiments such as these of course, are hardly controversial; they represent a familial credo among professional historians. What makes them noteworthy, however, is their relevance to Ravitch's most recent work of historical scholarship, a sweeping account of “school reforms” in the twentieth century. The irony is that Ravitch today can fairly be accused of many of the sins she so roundly criticized the revisionists of committing more than twenty years ago. Her book, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, is a broad chronicle of debates over education in the twentieth century United States. But it is largely a history without context, and one that telescopes past ideas about education into a single-minded concern about educational standards, one of Ravitch's pet peeves in current debates about educational policy. In this work we find a classic example of history turned to the purpose of supporting a political agenda, and while this may make for interesting politics (and nice reviews from political allies), it hardly results in responsible history. It should be stated at the outset that most experienced historians of education will learn fairly little from this book. Much of the ground that Ravitch covers herein has been well traversed, most recently by Herbert Kliebard, but also by a host of others, including Ravitch's late mentor, Lawrence Cremin. In retrospect this is not a surprise, since the book does not appear to have been intended for a professional audience. Rather, it seems to have been aimed at that that proverbial quarry of popular historians, and especially commercial publishers, the general reader. This suggests that Ravitch was largely unconcerned with noting the work of other historians throughout Left Back, except when it tended to support conclusions she favored. One could also say that there is quite little in the book that would be contradicted by other published historical accounts, even if there are many issues in it that historians might find exceptionable. In any case, historiography is not its long suit. Rather, the book appears intended to influence public thinking about school reform, with particular attention to problems of the present. Ravitch's argument is not difficult to summarize in a nutshell: a relatively small but highly vocal and influential group of education professors and their allies undermined the ability of American schools to maintain high standards of instruction and a responsible curriculum. At least this is the major point of the book through its first eight or nine chapters (out of eleven); it gets a little more complicated in treating the more recent decades. But the underlying point is that the earlier experiences established a pattern that was difficult to break. The basic character of educational reform, it seems, was set in the opening decades of the twentieth century, and it was the handiwork of an elite cabal of education “experts” who systematically attacked traditional forms of education with such fervor that schooling eventually was broken down to an anti-intellectual pabulum that sapped the academic life out of generations of American students. Not surprisingly, given this account of the historical record, Ravitch suggests that raising standards is the greatest single remedy at the disposal of would-be reformers today. The characters in this drama are familiar, and Ravitch's treatment of them has a strong “gotcha” flavor. On one side are the progressives: Dewey, Kilpatrick, Rugg, Counts and their friends. They are joined in this account by the likes of Thorndike, Terman, Hall, Bobbitt, Charters and Snedden, strange bedfellows indeed. On the other side are a handful of courageous scholars who stood up for traditional values in education, especially William Bagley and Isaac Kandel. These men were assisted by many level-headed educators and scholars who found the ideas of the progressives either silly or dangerous in varying degrees. On one side stood the opponents of high standards for learning, and the other the advocates of rigor and discipline. The story that Ravitch purports to tell is how the ideas of the first group defeated the other, even though the opponents of progressivism apparently possessed the good sense to construct telling arguments against the excesses of the most romantic reformers. It is the success of the progressives that represents the “century of failed school reforms” in the title of the book, and the chief problem to be overcome if American education is to be successfully rescued from its own history. The difficulties with this general line of argument are not hard to see, especially for professional historians, and they are related directly to Ravitch's earlier admonitions to the revisionists. In her single-minded determination to construct the terms of a “great debate” in American educational history, Ravitch has telescoped the past into a very curious explanatory frame. First, she lumps all “progressives” together, including many that engaged in bitter debates, and who held widely divergent views on many topics, including matters of curriculum and instruction. There is almost nothing here of the various positions or viewpoints within the ranks of educational “experts” of the day. Instead all are reduced to one common element: opposition to traditional forms of education, whatever that may be taken to represent. Thus we find the most messianic and mechanistic testers and social efficiency advocates lumped together with devotees of child study and student centered educational reform. Ravitch tips her hat to the progressive concern with undoing the evils of school practices of the past, but never seriously addresses the issue of which problems various reformers saw themselves correcting. The result is not a nuanced and careful history, examining the past “on its own terms.” Rather, it appears to be a search for a common element that can be linked to the present, without regard to the circumstances and experiences of the historical actors being considered. A second point concerns the narrow purview of this historical treatment. In hundreds of pages, Ravitch manages to discuss only a relative handful of people. She addresses a host of historical topics, from the Committee of Ten, to the rise of testing, to curriculum development and child- study, to progressive fascination with the Soviet Union, to the impact of the Second World War and the Cold War, right on up through the 1960's and seventies into the present. But the focal point of attention is consistently on a very small slice of the educational establishment, most of them well known names in the modern history of education. Doing this, of course, means that much of the book is dominated by biographical sketches of these interesting people, and lengthy accounts of their ideas and exploits, all of which is likely to prove quite fascinating to general readers unfamiliar with the field. But it conveys a rather simplistic sense of just how things occurred in the past—or for that matter how current events unfold—especially in the realm of schooling. Moreover, one has to wonder about her choice of subjects, and whether she seriously considered many alternatives. Much of the action she describes occurred in New York, Washington and a few other places. This undoubtedly made the research more convenient, but the book is supposed to about national events. This represents a somewhat different form of telescoping. Finally there is the all-important question of interpretation, or the leap from the evidence presented in the book to Ravitch's larger argument about the development of American education in the twentieth century. Here the book encounters its biggest problems. The basic question is how one proceeds from discussing a small group of people to determining changes in an enterprise as large and complex as the nation's educational system. Ravitch tends to use the technique of making sweeping generalizations, some of which no doubt would test the credulity of even her most historically naive general readers, if indeed they thought much about it. One example is her characterization of Teachers College, Columbia University as a hotbed of soft- headed pedagogical progressivism, an assertion made repeatedly. The problem is that the chief opponents of the ideas she attributes to nearly everyone at Teachers College were themselves faculty members there, Bagley and Kandell. Bagley, in fact, had started his career elsewhere, and was invited to join the Teachers College faculty after voicing criticisms of progressive ideas, a development that would seem to give lie to the institution's monolithic ideological quality. What is more, Teachers College also was home to Thorndike, Snedden and a host of other figures who were anything but disciples of Kilpatrick, Counts and other founders of the Social Frontier. In short, it was a complicated place, with many different ideological corners, and a faculty with widely divergent views about schools and learning. Ravitch's account, however, fails to convey this aspect of the institution, and instead she paints it with a single brushstroke. Again, this is hardly the approach Ravitch had recommended in her treatment of the revisionists in the 1970s. There are innumerable additional instances where Ravitch's generalizations should be challenged. One is her characterization of William Heard Kilpatrick's influence, even if one accepts her depiction of his ideas. She notes the familiar statistic associated with Kilpatrick: he reportedly taught some 35,000 students over the course of his career at Teachers College. Because this statistic supports a point she wants to make, documenting Kilpatrick's nefarious influence on the course of educational change, Ravitch does not treat it in a critical fashion. But the question is a fair one, especially if the topic of influence is at issue. As Ravitch notes, Kilpatrick was principally a teacher of educational philosophy, what we today would refer to as a foundations course. This, of course, helps explain why he saw so many students; his class was a core requirement, or at least one that most students could take to fulfill such a requisite. What is more, Kilpatrick was a famously charismatic lecturer, who consistently drew big classes—and this too helps account for the numbers. But these points all serve to undermine the point about influence, especially if the argument is that Kilpatrick affected the way these students thought about instruction. Most took their methods courses with different faculty members, and worked in the schools, where they learned directly from practicing teachers. Did Kilpatrick exert more influence than these figures? Why should we think so? Beyond that, of course, even 35,000 students is a relative drop in the rather large bucket of American education as a whole, especially when one considers the relatively short careers of most teachers in the era prior to World War Two. To suggest that Kilpatrick cast an especially troublesome shadow over the course of American educational development because of his teaching, in that case, is a rather long interpretive leap. Most professors working in education foundations fields today, even the most charismatic and popular, have few illusions about the extent of their influence on the teachers their students become. As Larry Cuban and many other researchers have reminded us, most teachers learn the most about education from their own experiences in classrooms, long before they ever step foot in the university. It is unlikely that Kilpatrick, no matter how appealing his manner or his ideas, could do much to change that. The question of influence, of course, is critical to Ravitch's argument. At the start of Chapter 9 she declares that “By the end of World War II, progressivism was the reigning ideology of American education.” To support this sweeping assertion she cites just two sources, Cremin's Transformation of the School and her own Troubled Crusade, the first some forty years old and the second largely concerned with events after the war. But these citations hardly settle the matter. Perhaps the assertion is correct, but it almost certainly requires more evidence than what this book provides; indeed, it is a fair historical question that remains largely unanswered today. Again, the point here is not the correctness of the assertion—that we do not know—but the manner in which Ravitch raises it. For her it is not presented as problematic, a historical puzzle to be addressed with the appropriate data. Instead, it is a flat declaration to be made as a part of her larger project to argue that progressive ideas served to undermine the foundation of educational thought and practice in the United States. As most historians know, there are a few historical studies that have addressed these questions directly. Ravitch mentions Larry Cuban and Arthur Zilversmit just briefly, two scholars who argue that progressive ideas had relatively little influence on the practice of teachers, but does not trouble her readers with the notion that there might be a question about the influence of progressivism in the book's principal narrative. She does not bother to challenge the evidence presented in these accounts, she simply ignores it for the most part. Again, this behavior hardly exhibits “a respect for the importance of context” that Ravitch had endorsed so emphatically some twenty years ago. Indeed, if there is one striking feature of this book, given its title, it is that it features so little discussion of actual school reforms. There is just one chapter devoted to the response of schools to these ideas, and much of that is a summary of various national commission reports and other documents that may or may not have reflected actual practices in the schools. In the end, Left Back is largely yet another book about the ideas of a handful of prominent professors and educational leaders. In this regard it adds little to the literature on twentieth century American education, and even less to understanding school reform. In certain respects the book's closing chapters are the most interesting. Predictably, Ravitch deplores the revival of progressive-style educational reforms in the 1960s and seventies, painting them with more or less the same strokes that she used for their predecessors. She reserves a lengthy discussion for contemporary reform initiatives, however, especially those in mathematics and history. In the latter case she takes curious tack, suggesting that opponents to the history standards advocated by most professional historians were right in their objections to the social- history orientation of suggested reforms. In this instance, it seems, the opinion of the scholarly community was wrong. History apparently is supposed to be simply a matter of recounting leaders and major national events, especially wars and legislation. Nuance and complexity, fact and interpretation, the stuff of doing history, are apparently beyond the ken of most students in Ravitch's view. What does that say about standards? There are many other things that could be said about this book, but to explore them would test the patience of even the most dedicated reader. As indicated earlier, it is a big book, touching on many developments in twentieth century American education, so there are countless other points that one could take issue with. Indeed, one could imagine a short volume dedicated to addressing the many questions in this book, not unlike Ravitch's own Revisionists Revised (although one doubts that the National Academy of Education would fund it). I will let the examples offered above stand, providing a general flavor of the volume; readers can take up other issues themselves. In the meantime, the larger point is that Diane Ravitch has herself become a revisionist in the intervening decades since Revisionists Revised was published, albeit with rather different politics than the historians she then undertook to skewer. Now Ravitch is the critic of American education, determined to use history to propose a certain reform agenda. The irony is that she has become in large measure just the sort of historian she deplored then, one with less interest in understanding the past than in using it to serve a given set of purposes in the present. About the Reviewer John L. Rury is Professor in the School of Education, where he works in the Social and Cultural Foundations in Education Program. A social historian, he received a Ph.D. in educational policy studies and history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1985-86, he was named a Spencer Fellow by the National Academy of Education. From 1992 to 1996 he served as Editor of the Social and Institutional Analysis section of the American Educational Research Journal. His publications include articles and book chapters on historical methodology, the history of women in education, problems in the history of urban education, and race and inequality. They have appeared in such interdisciplinary forums as History of Education Quarterly, Social Science History, Teachers College Record, Urban Education, Educational Policy, and the Journal of Negro Education. He is the author of Education and Women's Work (1991) and co-editor of Seeds of Crisis: Public Schooling in Milwaukee Since 1920 (1993). His current research focuses on the recent history of education in Chicago and problems of urban development in large northern metropolitan systems.