The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

Citation

Ravitch, D. (2016). The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (Rev. and expanded ed.). Basic Books.

Chapter Summary

The book first appeared in 2010 and became a bestseller. Its author is a historian of American education who had served as Assistant Secretary of Education under President George H. W. Bush and had supported the testing and choice reforms she now criticises. The 2016 revised edition, about 400 pages, keeps the eleven chapters of 2010 and adds an epilogue, "School and Society". Library catalogue records show the front matter growing from ten to forty-four pages. The publisher's description of the revised edition adds the Common Core and the replacement of teachers by technology to the reforms under criticism, alongside privatisation, standardised testing, charter schools and vouchers. Examples come from New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver and San Diego.

Chapter 1: What I Learned About School Reform

An autobiographical opening. Sherman Dorn's essay review in Education Review (2010) summarises it as an account of Ravitch's roles in policy debates: her histories of education, her post in the first Bush administration, her place in a network of think tanks and foundations that promoted market-oriented reform, and her growing disenchantment with No Child Left Behind and with local test-based and market-based reforms.

Chapter 2: Hijacked! How the Standards Movement Turned into the Testing Movement

Ravitch's account of how the curriculum-standards movement of the 1980s and early 1990s turned into a movement about testing. According to Dorn, she argues that A Nation at Risk (1983) aimed to improve public schools, not to destroy them, and that the attack on the voluntary national history standards in the mid-1990s made states wary of writing specific content standards.

Chapters 3–5: The Transformation of District 2; Lessons from San Diego; The Business Model in New York City

Three linked case studies of district reform. Dorn describes them as the story of how Tony Alvarado's consensus-building work in New York's District 2 became Alan Bersin's top-down mandates as superintendent in San Diego, and then Joel Klein's management of New York City's schools as chancellor.

Chapter 6: NCLB: Measure and Punish

An assessment of the No Child Left Behind Act. Reviewers report the core argument: accountability based on reading and mathematics scores led schools to teach to the test, narrowed the curriculum, and encouraged states to lower the scores counted as proficient.

Chapter 7: Choice: The Story of an Idea

The history of school choice. Dorn notes that Ravitch traces charter schools from Albert Shanker's idea of freeing teachers to run innovative schools to large charter management organisations, and reviews research that does not confirm the claims made for choice. The NPR review adds her finding that charter students on average do not outperform public school students.

Chapter 8: The Trouble with Accountability

The general case against high-stakes, test-based accountability. In Dorn's summary, the book's testing argument covers teaching to the test, curriculum narrowing, test-score inflation and low proficiency cut-scores. This chapter and Chapter 6 carry most of it.

Chapter 9: What Would Mrs. Ratliff Do?

Dorn identifies this, with Chapter 1, as one of the two chapters where Ravitch writes from her own experience rather than recent policy history.

Chapter 10: The Billionaire Boys' Club

The influence of the Gates, Walton and Broad foundations on school reform. Dorn calls this criticism of philanthropic foundations the book's most important original contribution: organisations that demanded accountability were, Ravitch argues, accountable to no one.

Chapter 11: Lessons Learned and Epilogue: School and Society

The conclusion sets out Ravitch's alternative. According to the NPR review, she would rescue the curriculum from the culture wars, set strong content standards and improve the conditions of teaching and learning, rather than argue over how school systems are organised and controlled. The 2016 epilogue, by its title, turns to the relationship between schools and society.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–2

• Standards versus testing: the difference between agreeing on curriculum content and measuring schools with test scores.
• A Nation at Risk: the 1983 report, which Ravitch reads as a call to improve public schools.

Chapters 3–8

• Top-down district reform: change imposed by superintendents and chancellors, set against consensus-building with teachers.
• Measure and punish: NCLB's use of test results to label and sanction schools.
• Teaching to the test and curriculum narrowing: the effects of high-stakes accountability on what is taught.
• School choice and charter schools: an idea that began with teacher-run schools and developed into managed chains.

Chapters 9–11 and Epilogue

• Venture philanthropy: large foundations funding a particular reform agenda.
• A rich curriculum: Ravitch's alternative, a shared curriculum in all subjects.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• An insider's change of mind. The book is valuable as a document: a former advocate of testing and choice explains what changed her view. Dorn and the NPR review both treat this as central to its impact.
• Concrete case histories. The district chapters on New York and San Diego, and the history of charter schools, give specific stories rather than general claims. Dorn singles them out as what the book adds to the familiar critique of testing.
• Readable and influential. Dorn calls it accessible, detailed and thoughtful, and notes that it reached teachers in a way earlier academic critiques of high-stakes testing had not.
• A positive alternative. Ravitch does more than criticise. She argues for a rich curriculum and better conditions for teaching.

Limitations

• A polemic. The book argues one side of a live political debate. It is best read with work by supporters of accountability and choice, or with research on the effects of particular policies.
• Contested history. Dorn, a historian of education, finds her account of the 1990s only partly persuasive. He argues that the drift towards testing began long before the attack on the history standards, so her counterfactual is "tenuous". Not every critic of testing shares her preference for curriculum standards, either.
• Limited updating. The revised edition keeps the 2010 chapters and adds new front matter and an epilogue. Readers should not expect the case studies themselves to have been rewritten to cover later developments.
• American scope. Federal law, school districts and charter schools are specific to the United States; readers elsewhere need some background.

Where It Fits in the Course

In the policy and sociology of education course this is the most accessible entry point, and it is a case study of one country's reform debates rather than a theoretical text. Stephen Ball's The Education Debate offers the concepts of policy analysis and traces marketisation and new forms of governance in England; it is the natural companion, because it shows the same market-based ideas in a different system and supplies the analytical vocabulary Ravitch does not use. Rizvi and Lingard's Globalizing Education Policy goes further, explaining how ideas such as test-based accountability travel between countries through international organisations.

For the sociological side, Diane Reay's Miseducation is a short, accessible account of class inequality in English schooling, and pairs well with Ravitch as two readable books from different traditions. Ballantine, Stuber and Everitt's The Sociology of Education is the survey textbook for systematic theory and research. Bourdieu and Passeron's Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture is a demanding classic that explains why schools reproduce inequality. Read it after these more accessible books.

How to Use This Book

No background is required, though readers outside the United States should first learn the basics of American school governance: local districts, state standards, federal law such as No Child Left Behind, and charter schools.

• Core: Chapter 1 for the author's position; Chapters 2, 6 and 8 for the argument about standards, testing and accountability; Chapter 7 on choice; Chapter 10 on foundations; and Chapter 11 for the alternative.
• Case material: Chapters 3–5 can be read as a unit and used for seminar discussion of how reform is implemented.
• Revised-edition material: read the expanded front matter and the epilogue last, as the author's later reflection on the original argument.

Read the book actively. For each chapter, note what evidence Ravitch offers and what an advocate of the policy would reply. Then read Dorn's essay review, which is freely available in Education Review, as a model of critical response. To bring the story up to date, compare the book's claims with what happened after 2016, or with debates over testing and school choice in your own country.