Years ago, when I was a struggling (and not particularly effective) classroom teacher, I regularly tossed out, tongue-in-cheek, "Kids actually learn in SPITE of us, rather than BECAUSE of us". Diane Ravitch's book has me pondering the prescience of that throwaway line. If Ravitch has it right, pretty much every educational innovation and reform movement of the last forty years has ended in failure. If we follow that thinking to its logical conclusion, then the prognosis for the current infatuation with communications technology, "data driven" assessment and technology-underpinned standardized testing is poor indeed.

To be fair, Ravitch does explore some relative successes, but only when measured through the selective lenses of external assessments. With the jury still out on whether these are accurate and relevant measures of actual learning, combined with the growing concerns about web-influenced attention deficit and changing patterns of reading and thinking, the hope for a "magic bullet" to solve all education's woes is dim indeed.

There is hope. There's always hope, but I'm not sure reading Ravitch's book will convince anyone that it lies with the current generation of educational reform and technology-rich innovation. It's probably more in the return to a simpler, more direct and more personalized form of individualized education - like the kind that produced some of western cultures most influential thinkers (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dewey, ...)