EduShyster is typically hilarious and arch. In this review, the only funny part is when she tells the tale of being required to entertain me for two hours in 2010 while pretending she had read my latest book.

In this review, she shows that she read “Reign of Error” carefully. She actually devoured it in less than two days, then overnight ed it to her sister, an elementary school teacher.

She writes:

“Fully half of the book is devoted to solutions, and it’s a measure of how quickly the worm is turning on the reform debate that Ravitch’s vision reads less like pie-in-the-sky than real policy recommendations. Income inequality, at its most extreme since 1927, seems likely to replace the achievement gap as the fiercely urgent cause of our time, particularly as the gap between rich and poor students now dwarfs the race gap. And poverty, which we now know is not an excuse, seems much harder to ignore when everyone is talking about it.”

When we met last spring, she was “struck by how upbeat she was. While I poked fun at the corporate reform movement on my blog, offline I often despaired. But she could already see that the movement was beginning to groan beneath the weight of its many contradictions, and that a day of reckoning wasn’t far off….

“Ravitch also expressed confidence that her then forthcoming book would succeed in changing the terms of the debate and refocusing attention back onto what public schools and the children they serve need to succeed. I found this almost impossible to fathom, an opinion that I maintained (albeit never expressed) until last week when I turned Reign’s final page, roughly a day and half after I’d started reading.”