{"id":2805,"date":"2010-12-01T11:22:00","date_gmt":"2010-12-01T15:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=2805"},"modified":"2010-12-01T07:35:21","modified_gmt":"2010-12-01T11:35:21","slug":"is-ravitch-really-a-great-historian-%c2%ab-jay-p-greene%e2%80%99s-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=2805","title":{"rendered":"So Jay Greene wants to know about Ravitch as an historian?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, Jay Greene asked&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/jaypgreene.com\/2010\/11\/30\/is-ravitch-really-a-great-historian\/\">if &nbsp;Ravitch&#39;s historical writings are solid<\/a>. Brief response: among historians of education, she&#39;s known for being reasonably careful in handling primary sources, and people debate whether the questions she asks are the right ones&#8230; which is often what debates over books turn on. In addition, she&#39;s known for being a wonderful stylist (or at least a good sight better than most of the rest of us), which can either delight or frustrate one depending on what you think of the underlying argument. She has also been criticized on occasion for cherry-picking subjects and sources and for turning to purple prose in relevant passages to paper over the historical complexities of a topic. I hear that on occasion, partisans of pet education policies are also known for cherry-picking data and should be familiar with what it feels like to read or proofread material that succumbs to confirmation bias. For the substantive historiographical debates around Ravitch, I recommend looking up the relevant book reviews, and anyone with a university library account should be able to collect a critical mass of them without too much difficulty.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>In terms of Ravitch&#39;s latest book,&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.edrev.info\/essays\/v13n6.pdf\">I<\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/www.edrev.info\/essays\/v13n6.pdf\">&#39;ve reviewed<\/a> <em>Death and Life<\/em>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tcrecord.org\/content.asp?contentid=16190\">John Rury<\/a> has as well. We focused on different aspects of the book.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, Jay Greene asked&nbsp;if &nbsp;Ravitch&#39;s historical writings are solid. Brief response: among historians of education, she&#39;s known for being reasonably careful in handling primary sources, and people debate whether the questions she asks are the right ones&#8230; which is often what debates over books turn on. In addition, she&#39;s known for being a wonderful stylist [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-Jf","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2805"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2810,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2805\/revisions\/2810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}