| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. By Diane Ravitch. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. 555 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-684-84417-6.)

Nearly twenty-five years ago Diane Ravitch stunned those familiar with the historiography of American education by publishing a devastating critique of revisionist scholarship in the field. In The Revisionists Revised: A Critique of the Radical Attack on the Schools (1978) she rebuked Michael B. Katz, Clarence J. Karier, and Joel Spring, among others, for oversimplifying, distorting, and politicizing America's educational past. She accused them of presentism and urged all historians of education "to abandon the simplistic search for heroes and devils, for scapegoats and panaceas." The author and editor of many important books on American education in the intervening years, Ravitch has now produced Left Back, a preachy volume that unfortunately exhibits all the faults that she once attributed to the so-called revisionists. . . .

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