Award-winning author, public intellectual, and former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch critiques a lifetime's worth of school reforms and reveals the simple--yet difficult--truth about how we can create actual change in public schools.

We are in an era of radical distrust of public education. Increasingly, we turn to standardized tests and standardized curricula-now adopted by all fifty states-as our national surrogates for trust. Legendary school founder and reformer Deborah Meier believes fiercely that schools have to win our faith by showing they can do their job. But she argues just as fiercely that standardized testing is precisely the wrong way to that end. The tests themselves, she argues, cannot give the results they claim. And in the meantime, they undermine the kind of education we actually want. In this multilayered exploration of trust and schools, Meier critiques the ideology of testing and puts forward a different vision, forged in the success stories of small public schools she and her colleagues have created in Boston and New York. These nationally acclaimed schools are built, famously, around trusting teachers-and students and parents-to use their own judgment. Meier traces the enormous educational value of trust; the crucial and complicated trust between parents and teachers; how teachers need to become better judges of each others' work; how race and class complicate trust at all levels; and how we can begin to 'scale up' from the kinds of successes she has created.

"From Cultural Appreciation Days to Gay-Straight Alliances to cafeteria menus featuring "ethnic options," twenty-first century American public schools bear the unmistakable mark of the diversity that has come to define the nation in the last fifty years. At the same time, it is also in public schools where citizens continue to organize most passionately to limit the influence of this heterogeneity on our curricula and classroom culture. Classroom Wars explores how we got here. Focusing in on California's schools during the 1960s and 1970s, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela charts how a state and a citizenry deeply committed to public education as an engine of civic and moral education navigated the massive changes brought about by the 1960s, including the sexual revolution, school desegregation, and a dramatic increase in Latino immigration. In California, where a volatile political culture nurtured both Orange County mega-churches and Berkeley coffeehouses, these changes reverberated especially powerfully. Analyzing two of the era's most innovative, nationally impactful, and never-before juxtaposed programs--Spanish-bilingual and sex education--Classroom Wars charts how during a time of extraordinary social change, grass-roots citizens politicized the schoolhouse and family. Many came to link such progressive educational programs not only with threats to the family and nation but also with rising taxes, which they feared were being squandered on morally lax educators teaching ethically questionable curricula. Using sources ranging from policy documents to personal letters, student newspapers, and oral histories, Petrzela reveals how in 1960s and 70s California--and the nation at large--a growing number of Americans fused values about family, personal, and civic morality, blurring the distinction between public and private and inspiring some of the fiercest classroom wars in American history, controversies that help explain the bitterness of the battles we continue to wage today"--

"A challenge to narrow, profit-driven conceptions of school success and an argument for protecting public education to ensure that all students become competent citizens in a vibrant democracy MacArthur award-winning educator, reformer, and author Deborah Meier draws on her fifty-plus years of experience in education to argue that the purpose of universal education is to provide young people with an "apprenticeship for citizenship in a democracy." Through an intergenerational exchange with her former colleague and fellow educator Emily Gasoi, the coauthors share their experiences working in democratically governed schools and analyze the last several decades of education reform. Reflecting on the trajectory of education and social policies that are leading our country further from rule "of, for, and by the people," the authors apply their extensive knowledge and years of research to address the question of how public education must change in order to counter the erosion of democratic spirit and practice in schools and in the nation as a whole"--

From the bestselling author of Cultural Literacy , a passionate and cogent argument for reforming the way we teach our children "Ought to be read by anyone interested in the education and training of the next generation of Americans."--Glenn C. Altschuler, Boston Globe Why, after decades of commissions, reforms, and efforts at innovation, do our schools continue to disappoint us? In this comprehensive and thought-provoking book, educational theorist E. D. Hirsch, Jr. offers a masterful analysis of how American ideas about education have veered off course, what we must do to right them, and most importantly why . He argues that the core problem with American education is that educational theorists, especially in the early grades, have for the past sixty years rejected academic content in favor of "child-centered" and "how-to" learning theories that are at odds with how children really learn. The result is failing schools and widening inequality, as only children from content-rich (usually better-off) homes can take advantage of the schools' educational methods. Hirsch unabashedly confronts the education establishment, arguing that a content-based curriculum is essential to addressing social and economic inequality. A nationwide, specific, grade-by-grade curriculum established in the early school grades can help fulfill one of America's oldest and most compelling dreams: to give all children, regardless of language, religion, or origins, the opportunity to participate as equals and become competent citizens. Hirsch not only reminds us of these inspiring ideals, he offers an ambitious and specific plan for achieving them.

"Seymour W. Itzkoff is a professor of education at Smith College where he has taught since 1965. Prior to that he taught in the public schools and Hunter College. He received his doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University. A specialist in educational theory, he has written Cultural Pluralism in American Education and Ernst Cassirer: Scientific Knowledge and the Concept of Man. An avid cellist, he has performed with symphony orchestras and is a member of a string quartet."