March 12, 2010 12:58PM 

# Ravitch-and-Hirsch-topia. 

By [Neal McCluskey](https://www.cato.org/people/neal-mccluskey) 

---

<a class="js-popover-trigger cursor-pointer popover-trigger" data-bs-placement="bottom" data-bs-trigger="click" id="popover-trigger"> 

SHARE 

</a> 

![Media Name: Ravitch.Hirsch.jpg](/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs_2x/public/wp-content/uploads/Ravitch.Hirsch.jpg?itok=mviEuSmi) 

If you follow education news at all, over the last week or so — until the national-standards stories took over — you probably saw a lot about education historian Diane Ravitch’s supposedly sudden determination that [school choice isn’t good after all](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/education/03ravitch.html?scp=3&sq=ravitch&st=cse). That’s one of the major selling points of her new book *[The Death and Life of the Great American School System](http://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp/0465014917),* and just about every major newspaper has devoted a fair amount of ink to it.

Now I’ve devoted some ink — okay, pixels — to it, too. You can check out [my review of Ravitch’s book](http://www.heartland.org/schoolreform-news.org/Article/27235/AntiChoice_Book_Ignores_Evidence_of_Need_for_Reform.html) on the brand-new [*School Reform News* website](http://www.heartland.org/schoolreform-news.org/index.html). When you’re done with that, you can take a gander at my [*Cato Journal* review ](https://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj30n1/cj30n1-15.pdf)of Core Knowledge guru E. D. Hirsch’s new offering, *[The Making of Americans](http://www.amazon.com/Making-Americans-Democracy-Our-Schools/dp/0300152817).* I think you’ll detect a unifying theme: Ravitch and Hirsch are excellent at their specialties — history and pedagogy, respectively — but they ignore just about everything they have lamented for decades about government schooling in order to proclaim that, um, we somehow need *more* government schooling.

Go figure!

##### Related Tags 

[Education](https://www.cato.org/education), [Center for Educational Freedom](https://www.cato.org/center-educational-freedom) 

[![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) 
This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).