“Getting Tough” in the Schools

The release of a half-dozen prestigious reports on schooling in America has initiated, according to Secretary of Education T. H. Bell, “the greatest, most promising development since the turn of the century.” Schools are, again, big news.

Diane Ravitch, a serious neoconservative historian and educational writer, provides an intellectually respectable description of the circumstances that have, presumably, necessitated these “promising developments.” This is what...