Politics and the Public School

...No doubt other books will build on this uncommonly able treatment of a confused period and delve more deeply into some of the issues it raises...

...Alas, in the period covered it did not serve that role-rather it became the object of many crusades, most in one way or another essential, yet all leaving a somewhat battered institutional structure...

...As New York City was being lorn apart by the question of community control of schools in the late 1960s, she explored the interesting and (to the participants in those battles) largely unknown history of the conflict in American school systems over the very same issue-with neighborhoods, ethnic groups and nonprofessionals pitted against local elites and professionals-And published her invaluable Great School Wars(\91A), When revisionist historians of American education were denouncing it for serving the interests of business, and imposing white Anglo-Saxon and middle-class norms on proletarians, she critically analyzed their work in The Revisionists Revised(1978), and effectively defended the basically progressive and democratizing character of American education...

...Because the perspective tends to the national, one looks for evidence on how the turmoil at the top affected the operations of schools and the effectiveness of education on the ground...

...I have been a partisan and polemicist (as well as, I hope, an analyst) on some of these issues, and as such I find the balance admirable...

...This is the only chapter that does not have a predominantly national focus, since the Federal government had little to do with either the spread of progressive education in its various forms or the attacks upon it: All that went on for the most pan at the level of schools of education, the districts or the local schools themselves...

...The task of writing a coherent history of American education, for any period, is monumental...

...Similarly, knowing some parts of the story intimately-especially those of the loyalty investigations and the student revolt- could have done with less detail on them and more on what they all meant...

...That is no less than the course many liberals have followed during the same period...

...The story is told in eight chapters: The first concerns the condition of American education at the War's end?the shortages of space, money and teachers, and the defeated early postwar efforts to secure Federal aid...

...Ravitch's view of what this development has meant for local autonomy and academic freedom is inevitably somewhat gloomy, though she consistently tries to be balanced...

...Certainly, no one who participates in the debates on education that appear, in 1983, to have taken a substantial place on the national agenda will be able to manage without a solid and thoughtful encounter with The Troubled Crusade...

...The concluding chapter deals with the latest phase of federal involvement with the schools, seeking less to revitalize...

...It is a testimonial to the stimulation of this book that it raises in the reader's mind questions he wishes the author had gone into further...

...Reviewed by Nathan Glazer Professor of Education and Social Structure, Harvard Graduate School of Education...

...Yet these are very well-researched and well-balanced presentations of controversial subjects and will be, I am sure, of value to many readers...

...1964-1982" Dian k Ravitch has a wonderful eye for I he right topic...

...Chapter six deals with the American student revolt that rocked higher education between 1964-70...

...Occasionally, Ravitch does provide this-in the case of progressive education, and in the discussion of exactly how widespread was the adoption and use of the new curricula sponsored by Federal grants-but one would have liked to see more...

...So the first half of the book-Albeit in the muted style that becomes a historical study?applauds the Federal role, but the last third, dealing with the increasing intrusions of courts and administrators in schools and colleges, raises substantial demurrers...

...There is very little on the private sector in American education, for example, or on the debate over vouchers, which may still be alive, and which raises key questions about the capacity to reach a consensus in our communities on matters of schooling...

...author...

...One must also deal with the complex interactions between education and the social structure, the developing economy, the changing culture...

...Ravitch, in the main line of liberal opinion, supported the Federal involvement: There should have been a way of overcoming problems of race and religion in the early postwar period to provide Federal funds for desperate local school districts...

...the destruction of segregated education was one of the great achievements of American postwar society, and painful as the struggle was, in the end Presidents and Congresses followed the lead of the Supreme Court in 1954, and even resistant states came to heel and accepted the injustice of racial segregation...

...Indeed, having thought of the project, one might be excused for abandoning it, because however managed, being accused of having left out something crucial-or main things that are crucial-is virtually unavoidable...

...It is, to think of the best word, a remarkably useful book...

...Chapter seven discusses the mostly Federally-funded reform nun e-ments that swept over American education in the wake of t he povert y program and the civil rights revolution, inspired by a discontent-particularly among middle-class liberals and intellectuals?with the education being provided for lower-class minority children...

...Ethnic Dilemmas...

...It reminds us of and reviews for us some major currents that have shaken American education in the past four decades...

...Others, I suspect, will detect a leaning toward one side or another that Ravitch has expressed in her periodical writing, but that I truly believe she eschews here...

...Diane Ravitch has selected as a mam line the political issues dominating American education during the years 1945-80...

...And now that education has become a topic of major national debate-in ways undoubtedly quite unexpected when she began the enormous research job of surveying and assimilating the information on American education after World War II-her history of our postwar experience in this area appears...

...Chapters four and five are devoted to Brown and its aftermath...

...hem through motive than to correct their presumed deficiencies-in regard to race, sex, linguistic minorities, the handicapped-through regulation and court order...

...There is the problem first of all of organizational complexity, with thousands of school districts, tens of thousands of schools...

...50 states, unnumbered professional associations, and Federal agencies-congressional, administrative, judicial?requiring close study...

...The second, reaching back into the 1920s, tells the story of "progressive" education and its decline into what seemed to be a set of slogans that, regardless of their direct impact on the schools, could be charged with contributing to the decline of educational effectiveness (a charge always made, yet surprisingly hard to demonstrate...

...Undoubtedly thechoiceof the term "crusade" for her title is meant to reflect this, as well as the fact that for so much of American history education itself was seen as the crusade that would raise an enlightened people, integrate the immigrant, prepare youngsters for the work of the world, teach morals and character...

...Each could be, and many have been, the subject of a book or thesis, and all have unexplored archival materials of value...

...The bent is clear, though, and the dilemma is too...