Learning from the Past

Diane Ravitch is Research Professor in the School of Education at New York University and holds the Herman and George R. Brown Chair in Education Studies at the Brookings Institution. She was an assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education, and she serves on the National Assessment Governing Board. Her publications include Learning from the Past: What History Teaches Us about School Reform and City Schools: Lessons from New York (both available from Johns Hopkins), The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980, and Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (forthcoming).

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I: Changes in Education Over TimeChapter 1. Assimilation, Adjustment, and Access: An Antiquarian View of American EducationChapter 2. Who's in Charge? Federal, State, and Local ControlChapter 3. Attitudes, Choices, and Behavior: School DeliveryPart II: Equity and MulticulturalismChapter 4. Changing Conceptions of Educational EquityChapter 5. Ethnic Diversity and National IdentityChapter 6. American History Reconsidered: Asking New Questions About the PastPart III: Recent Strategies For Reforming the SchoolsChapter 7. The Search for Order and the Rejection of Conformity: Standards in American EDucationChapter 8. Reinventing SchoolingChapter 9. The New Politics of ChoicePart IV: The Six National GoalsChapter 10. School Readiness and Early Childhood EducationChapter 11. School Leaving: Dead End or Detour?Chapter 12. Rhetoric and Reality: The High School CurriculumChapter 13. Literate America: High-Level Adult Literacy as a National GoalChapter 14. Reefer Madness and A Clockwork OrangeContributors

"The quality of the contributors alone is enough to make this an excellent book. It is a valuable compendium--and bibliography--of recent thinking on the historical context of current discussions of educational reform. It should be read by educational policymakers and by anyone who wants to be sufficiently well-informed about education to participate in the reform process."--Robert A. McCaughey, Barnard College