A "simpleminded focus on standardized testing," the "punitive" use of test scores and the "multiplication of charter schools" are undermining public schools, not improving them.

Chances are you have heard criticism like this before, but not from a former U.S. Department of Education official who had actively promoted those reforms.

In "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," Diane Ravitch, a respected New York University education historian long allied with conservative think tanks, reviews the evidence that led to her dramatic 180-degree shift.

Dr. Ravitch was an assistant secretary in the education department during the first Bush administration, and she served on the board overseeing national testing during the Clinton years.

In 2001, she was among the guests in the White House East Room when President George W. Bush announced the education reform plans that became the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.

She describes herself as "captivated" at that time by the new emphasis on accountability, incentives and markets. She writes that she was optimistic that "testing would shine a spotlight on low-performing schools, and choice would create opportunities for poor kids to leave for better schools."

But Dr. Ravitch now concedes that "there was little empirical evidence, just promise and hope."

The book's title refers to Jane Jacobs' 1961 classic, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," which blamed top-down urban planning for hastening the decline of functioning inner-city neighborhoods. For a Pittsburgh example, think East Liberty's 1960s-era urban renewal.

Dr. Ravitch would have us believe that eventually we will regret and dismantle the NCLB reforms, much like East Liberty's short-lived pedestrian mall, the now-razed high-rise public housing complexes and the confusing one-way traffic ring.

In largely jargon-free language, she examines the research findings that changed her mind. At an education conference in 2006, she "realized NCLB was a failure." There she learned that only a small share of families chose to move their children out of schools deemed "failing" or to use the free tutoring services NCLB made available.

She also encountered research suggesting little or no link between school choice and student achievement. Equally troubling, achievement gains on national tests -- including those for minority students ­-- showed more growth before the NCLB reforms were enacted.

"I am too 'conservative' to embrace an agenda whose end result is entirely speculative and uncertain," she writes. Once an advocate of using market-based incentives to reform schools, Dr. Ravitch now insists that schools function better in an atmosphere of cooperation, not competition.

Schools should be "sharing ideas not competing with each other for resources," she writes, setting herself in opposition to the Obama administration's Race to the Top grants competition.

She also decries the relentless test prep that has displaced real education. "Schools are not in the business of producing test scores, but in educating children," she argues.

Dr. Ravitch also charges that to avoid sanctions, some states have lowered the bar or made their tests easier. More students pass, but the results are a sham.

A historian, she traces 20 years of contentious reform experiences in several urban school districts, including New York City and San Diego. These chapters offer Pittsburgh readers a historical perspective on initiatives under way in the city schools and the constraints faced by such districts as Wilkinsburg and Duquesne.

Dr. Ravitch writes with alarm about the dangers of using student test scores to determine teacher pay, documenting unreliable results and multiple flaws in current statistical methods. (The Pittsburgh Public School District is developing a system linking teacher pay with a number of measures including student scores using Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funds.)

Student test scores are determined by more than just a teacher's skill, she argues. Missing are critical factors of student diligence and motivation, such as showing up for class, paying attention and doing homework.

Dr. Ravitch also now opposes charter schools, reporting that students in charter schools, on average, perform no better than their counterparts in public schools. She faults some charter schools for "creaming off" the most motivated urban students, leaving "regular public schools with the most difficult students to educate" and creating a "two-tiered system of widening inequality."

Her plea to preserve neighborhood schools as essential to a democratic society lacked empirical evidence. Her argument struck me as nostalgic and naive, and it rang hollow when I learned she sent her own children to private schools.

The author has harsh words for what she views as foundations' heavy-handed promotion of testing and charter schools based more on free-market ideology than evidence, singling out the Gates and the Eli and Edythe Broad foundations, both of which are underwriting local school initiatives.

"There is something fundamentally undemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society's wealthiest people," Dr. Ravitch writes, calling them "bastions of power unaccountable to voters."

But what direction does she propose for U.S. education? She offers no "quick fixes or short cuts" because she believes none exists. She does recommend developing a rich liberal arts curriculum, addressing the disadvantages of poverty, putting educators back in charge of education decisions, and using test scores to identify problems to fix, rather than people or schools to punish.

Her prescriptions are not new and are disappointingly unspecific. But sharing what she calls her "wrenching transformation" took courage.

The Obama administration recently announced its plans for a NCLB Act overhaul to Congress. Let's hope lawmakers share Dr. Ravitch's courage to change course and rethink NCLB in view of the evidence she marshals.

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