A Debate on Education

I am grateful to the editors of Dissent for the opportunity to reply to Deborah Meier’s article, “‘Getting Tough’ in the Schools: A Conservative Prescription,” reviewing my book, The Troubled Crusade, in the Winter 1984 Dissent.

I hesitate to call Deborah Meier’s article a book review, because it has so little to do with the book I wrote. She uses the review as an opportunity to express her opposition to current efforts to reform education, and she would have been on firmer ground had she directly reviewed the reports of the National Commission on Excellence, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and others (all of which appeared after my book was in press or...