The Death and Life of the Great American School SystemHow Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

Diane Ravitch spent two decades helping build the machine. She testified before Congress, advised presidents, and championed standardized testing and school choice as the path to saving American education. Then she changed her mind. Publicly. In print. Not as a quiet revision buried in a footnote, but as a two hundred forty-page book with thirty pages of end notes, arguing that the reforms she had advocated were failing children. That kind of reversal demands attention. Dirk Windhorst's review of The Death and Life of the Great American School System captures what made Ravitch's about-face so significant. This was not a casual critic. This was, in Windhorst's words, a historian using her skills to tell the story of American education over the past two decades. Ravitch herself frames the reversal in empirical terms: "my views changed as I saw how these ideas were working out in reality. It is a mark of a sentient human being to learn from experience, to pay close attention to how theories work out when put into practice." That sentence does a lot of work. It shifts the ground from ideology to evidence. The two positions she recanted are specific. First: the adoption of free-market business practices to make schools more competitive. Second: the use of standardized testing as the primary measure of student learning. Those two ideas were not fringe proposals — they were the operating logic of American education reform for a generation. To understand why Ravitch once believed in them, you have to take the logic seriously. The market argument had real appeal. Public schools, the thinking went, operated as monopolies — no competition, no incentive to improve. Open the system to alternatives like charter schools, give parents choices, and the market would do what markets do: reward better performers and push out the weak ones. Testing supplied the measurement layer. If you were going to hold schools accountable, you needed numbers. Standardized tests provided clear, comparable data on basic skills. Competition plus measurement — it was a coherent package, and it attracted both policymakers and serious money. Windhorst notes that philanthropic capital from billionaires like Bill Gates underwrote the proliferation of charter schools at scale. This was not a theoretical exercise. It became federal law. That is where Ravitch's account turns. Windhorst traces how carefully reasoned recommendations in A Nation at Risk — the landmark nineteen eighty-three report warning of a "rising tide of mediocrity" in American schools — morphed into what Ravitch calls the "crude and unrealistic mandates" of No Child Left Behind. Market-based reforms took hold in New York City after September eleventh and spread nationally. The direction held across administrations: Ravitch argues that Barack Obama quickly fell into step behind George W. Bush's agenda, continuing the push for testing and choice. The evidence, as Ravitch assembled it, pointed to failure on both fronts. Start with testing. Most American standardized tests, Windhorst reports Ravitch arguing, narrowly assess basic skills and rely on multiple-choice questions throughout. When scores on those tests carry consequences — for schools, for teachers, for students — instruction follows the test. Resources and time flow toward tested subjects. Everything else gets squeezed. Ravitch's phrase for it is blunt: testing pushes teachers to "rob Peter to pay Paul." Physical education, visual arts, history, the subjects that constitute a coherent education — they lose ground to literacy and numeracy drills. The narrowing goes deeper than scheduling. Windhorst documents Ravitch's account of how centralized mandates and data obsession flatten professional judgment. She traces the spread of Balanced Literacy — a pedagogical approach imported from Australia and New Zealand in nineteen eighty-seven — into American districts, where it became a required lingua franca that teachers had to mouth regardless of whether it fit their students or their expertise. The bureaucratic demand for measurable outputs, Ravitch argues, stifles the kind of teaching that actually changes lives. She makes that argument personal. Her favorite teacher, Ruby Ratliff, was the kind of educator who inspired students, demanded rigorous writing, and altered trajectories. Under current data-driven incentive structures, Ravitch writes, Ratliff's greatness "would go unrewarded" because it "is not in demand and cannot be measured." That is not a sentimental aside — it is a structural critique. When accountability systems can only capture what tests measure, they systematically undervalue what matters most. Against all of this, Ravitch's positive vision is substantive. She is not simply arguing for less testing and less competition. She is arguing for a different foundation entirely: explicit, coherent curriculum grounded in the liberal arts and sciences, and teachers who are, in her phrase, "well educated, not just well trained." She cites Massachusetts as an example worth emulating — a state that requires students to learn world history alongside American history, treating the curriculum as genuinely important rather than a backdrop to test preparation. Real accountability, in her framework, flows from strong curriculum and genuine professional expertise, not from punitive measurement. She reaches for a literary parallel to convey her ambitions. Ravitch explicitly likens her goal to the urban renewal sparked by Jane Jacobs — recalling the great cities not by razing neighborhoods and replacing them with planned developments, but by understanding what gave those places life in the first place. Windhorst uses the Ontario context to test how far Ravitch's critique travels beyond American borders, and the comparison is instructive. Some features of American reform did migrate north — Balanced Literacy arrived in Ontario via the United States. But Ontario's standardized testing regime differs from the American model in key ways. The province's Education Quality and Accountability Office, known as the EQAO, designs tests that are linked to the actual Ontario Curriculum and include opportunities for students to write their own answers — not purely multiple-choice instruments measuring narrow basic skills. An EQAO official told Windhorst there were no plans to extend testing to other subject areas. That distinction matters. Curriculum-aligned testing with constructed responses is a different instrument than a multiple-choice basic-skills test with federal sanctions attached. And yet Windhorst accepts Ravitch's deeper point even here: the logic of high-stakes focus on literacy and numeracy encourages teachers to deprioritize untested subjects regardless of where the tests come from. He also raises a pointed curricular gap — the Ontario Curriculum, unlike Massachusetts, does not require any world history. The comparison flatters Ontario in some ways and challenges it in others. What Ravitch's book ultimately forces into view is a question about scale and humility. When reform ideas move from theory to national law, the stakes are not abstract. They are measured in classroom hours, in subjects not taught, in teachers whose strengths go unrecognized, in students whose education is narrowed to what a multiple-choice test can capture. Windhorst reports Ravitch's judgment plainly: these reforms "failed to produce better schools" and are "threatening the education of a whole generation of young people." That is a serious charge, made by someone who once argued the other side. What Ravitch models, beyond the specific policy critique, is a way of engaging with evidence. She watched how the theories played out in practice, she updated her views, and she said so in public. That is harder than it sounds. Policy worlds reward consistency and punish apostasy. The fact that her reversal created a national stir is itself a measure of how settled the reform consensus had become — and how much it needed someone with her standing to name what the data was showing. The reforms she describes did not fail because they were poorly implemented or insufficiently funded. They failed, in her account, because the underlying model was wrong. Schools are not firms. Teachers are not interchangeable inputs. Learning is not a product that competition and measurement alone can optimize. The machine Ravitch helped build was built on a flawed blueprint — and she used her expertise, ultimately, to say so. 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