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Among the hundreds of educators, scholars and politicians who've been engaged in educational policy-making during the past generation, or the thousands who've written or made speeches about our schools, few have the stature that Diane Ravitch now has. In an age when almost everybody has an opinion about schools, Ravitch's name must be somewhere near the top of the Rolodex of every serious education journalist in this country. Call her a moderate-conservative on the spectrum of school politics: She served as an Assistant Secretary of Education (for research) in the Bush Administration, but Ravitch is first and foremost an education historian, a teacher and a policy analyst. She would probably describe herself as being among the liberal traditionalists who are her heroes, a smart and relentless advocate of rigorous academic standards in the traditional disciplines and the belief that every child can learn.

Given that reputation, any major Ravitch book on schools is going to get respectful attention, particularly at a time when education is at the top of the national agenda, when schools are said (again) to be in crisis and are so deep in yet another wave of reform, much of it the kind of reform--higher standards, greater accountability, high-stakes testing--that she herself has advocated. When the book is described as a sort of personal summa theologica, the voluminous story of a century of failed school-reform movements in a nation in which school reforms are decreed at the drop of a hat, or the launching of a Soviet Sputnik, or the most recent headlines about the poor performance of US students on international tests in math and science, it will get special attention. Ravitch aims for nothing less than ending our present confusion about what the schools might be by showing what they have been.

And in many respects, the book lives up to the expectations: Ravitch always writes in the tone of the ultimately reasonable person. She understands that despite generation after generation of complaints about the decline of the schools and the corresponding call for a return to "the good old days," there was never such a golden age in US schools. As she says at the very start, "It is impossible to find a period in the twentieth century in which education reformers, parents and the citizenry were satisfied with the schools." (The schools, as Will Rogers was supposed to have said, were never as good as they used to be.) She also understands the strong penchant in US education for faddism and fashion. "If there is a lesson to be learned from the river of ink that was spilled in the education disputes of the twentieth century," she says, "it is that anything in education that is labeled a 'movement' should be avoided like the plague."

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