AmRen - The Egalitarian Illusion - Jane Weir reviews: Raymond Wolters' 'The Long Crusade: Profiles in Educational Reform–1967-2014' - "The common thread running through most of these experiments is a preoccupation with race ... How do we manage and teach our disadvantaged minorities without acknowledging the basic reality of racial differences in IQ?"

The futile fight against the achievement gap.

Raymond Wolters, The Long Crusade: Profiles in Educational Reform–1967-2014, Washington Summit Publishers, 2015, 595 pp., $32.00 (softcover)

“It’s the biggest train set a boy ever had!” Orson Welles is reported to have said in 1940, upon arriving at a Hollywood soundstage to make Citizen Kane.

I don’t know if the Welles line is apocryphal, but it kept going through my head as I was reading The Long Crusade, Raymond Wolters’s masterful, comprehensive survey of progressive education fads and fallacies of the past half-century or so. A public education system is a huge and expensive train set–and one you cannot shut down. And so there’s endless opportunity for politicians, social engineers, and preening philanthropists to experiment: Chris Whittle’s Edison Project, Wendy Kopp’s Teach for America (and its many spinoffs), charter schools, magnet schools, universal Pre-K, No Child Left Behind, Common Core, etc. ...

http://www.amren.com/features/2015/08/the-egalitarian-illusion/