Books like Reign of Error by Diane Ravitch

A poignant portrait of an eleven‑year‑old Black girl in mid‑20th‑century America, whose longing for blue eyes reflects deeper wounds of family, race, and identity.

A firsthand memoir of teaching English to the sons of North Korea’s elite during Kim Jong‑il’s final months, revealing life in the isolated Pyongyang University of Science and Technology.

"Left Back recounts grandiose efforts by education reformers to use the schools to promote social and political goals, even when they diminished the schools' ability to educate children. It shows how generations of reformers have engaged in social engineering, advocating such innovations as industrial education, intelligence testing, curricular differentiation, and life-adjustment education. These reformers, she demonstrates, simultaneously mounted vigorous campaigns against academic studies.". "In describing the wars between competing traditions of education, Ravitch points the way to reviving American education. She argues that all students have the capacity to learn and that all are equally deserving of a solid liberal arts education. Left Back addresses issues of the utmost importance and urgency. It is a large work of history that by recovering the past illuminates a future."--BOOK JACKET.

Award-winning author, public intellectual, and former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch critiques a lifetime's worth of school reforms and reveals the simple--yet difficult--truth about how we can create actual change in public schools.