Reviewed by Eleanor J. Bader

Historian of education Diane Ravitch was once a prolific writer and speaker on the U.S. right. As a fervent opponent of feminism and other contemporary social movements, she spent more than three decades championing education reforms that included charter schools, vouchers, and rigorous standardized testing. These positions not only won her plaudits from conservative leaders and think tanks, but also led to high-level positions in the administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and hobnobbing with the powerful.

Over time, however, skepticism began to seep in and Ravitch began to question her long-held beliefs. “I saw that the toxic policy of federally mandated high-stakes testing was inflicting harm on students and teachers by establishing unattainable goals and demonizing public schools,” she writes in An Education. She also began to recognize the class and racial bias endemic to standardized testing, noting that high scores typically reflect access to wealth and privilege rather than intelligence or the ability to learn. Moreover, she saw that schools were failing to achieve their mission. “The experience of schooling should prepare young people to live and work with others in a democratic society and to contribute to the improvement of that society. Schools should encourage students to be the best they can be, not to be standardized into a preset mold.”

But they are not doing this.

An Education, part memoir and part analysis of failed state and federal reforms, takes contemporary policy makers to task for this failure. Honest, forthright, and wise, it’s an inside glimpse into the machinations of power from someone who has seen how ideas are used, manipulated, and sold to the public. It’s an important and insightful contribution to the field of educational policy and a passionate defense of public education.

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An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else by Diane Ravitch. Columbia University Press. October 2025.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Guest Post by Marc Martorell

The central contention in Leon Fink’s Undoing the Liberal World Order: Progressive Ideals and Political Realities Since WWII is that US foreign policy in the decades following the Second World War had an important component of liberal idealism. Fink presents readers with examples of these progressive ideals in practice. Thus, we learn how, after the end of the war, the US promoted democratic decision-making structures for German workers in the industrial sector to thwart Communism in the areas occupied by the Allies.

In Central America, US liberals found an ally in Costa Rica’s President José Figueres Ferrer, who pursued significant social democratic reforms while remaining anti-Communist. Meanwhile, the liberal US ambassador in New Delhi, Chester B. Bowles, coordinated US aid for India’s agricultural development with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Fink is more convincing in arguing that the role of progressive ideals in US foreign policy declined during the last decades than he is in proving that these kinds of ideals were important in the first place. The examples presented in the text are largely in line with the book’s thesis, but readers may legitimately ask themselves whether these cases are representative of a significant trend or the result of very specific conjectures.

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Undoing the Liberal World Order: Progressive Ideals and Political Realities Since World War II by Leon Fink. Columbia University Press, January 2022.

Reviewer Bio: Marc Martorell Junyent graduated in International Relations and currently holds a joint Master in Comparative Middle East Politics and Society at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and the American University in Cairo. His main interests are the politics and history of the Middle East (particularly Iran, Turkey and Yemen). He has studied and worked in Ankara, Istanbul and Tunis. He tweets at @MarcMartorell3.