The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980 Paperback – Big Book, March 11, 1985

Diane Ravitch is one of the nation's experts on education, particularly K-12. Her history of American education from the postwar period until 1980 is, thus, a must-read for students of the subject.This is a period of massive change, encompassing as it does the civil rights movement, the vast changes in higher education which followed the passage of the GI Bill, the conflicts brought by, in shorthand, `the sixties', the open education movement which followed on the progressive movement and the resulting back to basics movement. This is the period of Sputnik and that in which a Department of Education was established.The book is excellent on the details of the specifics, e.g. the Brown decision, and the author is capable of taking us through, day by day, step by step, speech by speech of, e.g., the occupation of Straight Hall at Cornell or the complex details of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. In this, she makes some choices. She says next to nothing about the bombing of Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin, e.g. and, in my judgment, gives comparatively short shrift to the lessons learned from the GI Bill.Nevertheless, the discussion of key historical actions and moments is exhaustive. In my opinion, however, the book is long on description and comparatively short on analysis. This is not to say that she fails to understand the issues. She understands the issues in detail and what she gains in balance, moderation and a fair depiction of the facts and issues is considerable. At the core, however, there is a lack of passion with regard to the consequences of the individual events. I purchased a used copy through an Amazon affiliate and one of the previous reader's marginalia revealed an ongoing attempt to determine what the author approved of and what she found wanting.I applaud the author's attempt to be open and balanced, but as she herself says at the book's conclusion, the entire history of the period is encompassed by a core question:The issue, which echoed complaints about the permissive aspects of progressive education and open education, was whether a democratic education system best served its students by letting them choose what they wanted to study, if they wanted to study; or whether it served them best by seeing that each and every one of them received a liberal education--including literature and language, science and mathematics, history and the arts. The debate reiterated the old arguments: one side claimed that a democratic school system had to proceed through the willing consent of the governed; the other insisted that a democratic school system had to assure everyone a sound education or suffer the creation of differential elites and of intolerable popular ignorance. (p. 326)This is well said, but what is the answer? Have we been served well by all of the methodological churning fostered by colleges of education striving for innovation? Do such colleges represent a force for enlightenment or a force for (unintended but catastrophic) disruption and failure? When the author looks at actual studies of issues (viz. do students actually learn more effectively under condition X?) she tends to conclude that there are arguments on both sides. The reader's dilemma: have we made the schools guinea pigs for the theory de jour, in some cases handicapping a generation or is everything just fine or is it simply too complex to know? (We are in the same place today. There are advocates, for example, for `different learning styles'. They urge us to personalize learning, student by student. What does this mean? Will some be permitted to keep journals rather than write formal essays? Will some be permitted to take oral exams rather than written exams? Will some be asked to learn certain material but be permitted to bypass other material? This is an issue which could lead to great academic success or serious academic failure. I have seen studies that suggest there really is no such thing as a different learning style. Can I count on those studies?)One of the most frightening documents a contemporary can contemplate is a list of the learning expectations of a one-room schoolhouse in the days prior to the world of modern innovations. The colleges of education look back to such institutions as `drill-and-grill' Gradgrind-loving chambers of torture. Perhaps there is something to that point of view. It is, however, an undeniable fact that the `revised' system has resulted in massive credential creep. A solid high school education of the 1930's or 40's could lead to a job that now requires a baccalaureate as well as a graduate degree. I was in my local bank two days ago and the manager told me that he now hires tellers with MBA degrees.Diane Ravitch is well aware of the reduction in expectations, the eroding of core curricula, grade inflation and the poor performance of students on standardized examinations which were common at the time of her writing. Now, thirty plus years later, commentators are generally agreed that the situation has not improved. Indeed, it has become much more desperate. My bottom line: in studying the history of preceding periods we should attempt to examine individual events and issues with an eye on public policy. We must sift and winnow (as the University of Wisconsin motto encourages) and determine what is effective and what is deleterious. There is too much at stake in our understanding of a crucial sector of the national culture, a sector which is at the center of attempts to enhance and perpetuate that national life in general and to help those most at risk within it. Is everything just fine or have we created a situation which has resulted in differential elites and intolerable popular ignorance?

This is my favorite of Diane Ravitch's books, written while she was at Teachers College/Columbia, and published in 1983. Trained as an historian, Ravitch writes beautifully. She sees the conflicts that have troubled American public education, the advocates for the various sides, and the results of conflicts with an historian's clear-eyed sense of proportion, cause-and-effect, and the consequences of certain policies.The history begins in post WW II America, when the bomber plants were closing, America was further urbanizing and suburbanizing, and, having won the war, what else was there to do? She describes the following decades clearly--the loyalty investigations, how Brown v Board of Education in Topeka stressed the then-intact system of discriminatory education, the rise of "social science" in education, the Vietnam War era of protest, drugs, reformers, radicals, and romantics. Her history ends in 1985, with the "new politics:" the rise of aggrieved groups, use of courts to make basic educational policy decisions, the return to ethnocentrism, bureaucratization, and fierce politicalization of the unions.Diane Ravitch writes beautifully. I know of no comparable history in American education. She has taken a quantum leap from other historians' writings in education. I loved this fluent and clear-eyed book. In 1983 the Pulitzer History prize was won by a book called The Transformation of Virginia. Ravitch's book is at a Pulitzer level.

Even though this book was published in 1985, it is a clear and cogent review of policy in the U.S. education arena. My graduate students have found their eyes opened by Ravitch's detailed and intelligent take on progressivism, the Red scare, the civil rights movement in education, including busing, the open school movement, the advent of PL 94-142 and Title IX, and other events from the 1920s to the 1980s.