Top education advocate Diane Ravitch has been on a tear recently.

Her "Death and Life of the Great American School System" ripped a new one for a generation's worth of politicians' approaches to "fixing" American schools.

Now, in the last two issues of the New York Review of Books, she has laid out a simple examination of our national obsession with teaching to the test, comparing it to Finland's success story, using a completely different approach.

It's stimulating stuff for anyone interested in improving American schools who'd rather look at best practices rather than random theories by right-wing ideologues.

This is the first of a two-part article. I've read the second in the current NYRB, and it's great. Hopefully it will be available soon online, so I can post a link.