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You don’t find approaches more AM and FM to America’s public schools – their successes and failures – than in new books by two of the nation’s leading voices on the subject, “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools” by Diane Ravitch and “Radical: Fighting to Put Students First” by Michelle Rhee.

They identify problems and solutions from polar opposite points of view, and as Andrew Delbanco concludes in a combined review in The New York Review of Books:

“Perhaps a starting point would be to acknowledge, as Ravitch does, that the golden age of master teachers and model children never existed, and, as Rhee insists, that the bureaucracy of our schools is wary of change. One thing that certainly won’t help our children is any ideology convinced of its exclusive possession of the truth.”

Delbanco’s thoughts on their thoughts can be found here.