Little dead schoolhouse

Ravitch, who teaches at New York University and chairs educational policy at the Brookings Institution, has occupied both sides of this perennially polarizing issue. She served in the US Department of Education under the first President Bush and helped found an education task force at the right-leaning Hoover Institution; from its inception, she was a vocal proponent of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation. In “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,’’ Ravitch changes sides, skewering Bush’s education plan, whose relentless focus on testing and Draconian deadlines for success she now sees as a “timetable for the demolition of public education in the United States.”

Readers who don’t follow education politics (or those who, like me, read articles about education as interested amateurs, which is to say, parents of school-aged children) may not realize the import of this conversion: Picture Joe Torre renouncing the Yankees and cheering for the Sox. In her opening chapter, Ravitch quotes economist John Maynard Keynes’s defense of his own reversal, “When the facts change, I change my mind.” Some might ask Ravitch whether or when the facts of No Child Left Behind actually changed (these would be critics who always thought it was a misbegotten disaster), but her new stance seems sincere, and the book that follows is, if not a mea culpa, perhaps something more valuable - a fiercely argued manifesto against fads in education reform and for public schools, and the teachers and students who inhabit them.