Books I'd like to read

The Sunday New York Times Book Review always reminds me of the slogan "So many books, so little time."  Today's should read is The Death and Life of the Great American School System, by Diane Ravitch.  An assistant secretary of education under the first George Bush, she was an advocate of school choice - vouchers for private schools and public funding for charter schools.  After twenty years of studying the results, she has now concluded (in the words of reviewer Alan Wolfe),

With so little effort devoted to the promotion of a sound curriculum, voucher schools, like those established in Milwaukee, turned out to offer few if any gains for those who attended them. As for charter schools, they have skimmed off the most motivated students without producing consistently better results than traditional public schools. ... Given that result, we should be working harder to preserve the benefits of community and continuity that neighborhood schools offer.