There is certainly no shortage of conservative polemics about education policy. They predictably tout ideas like school vouchers, praise classicists like Mortimer Adler and generally decry the state of American public education.

Meanwhile, a cadre of liberal authors turns out equally predictable tomes debunking these ideas. So why even pay close attention to the most recent entrant in this pretty ritualistic back and forth? Primarily because while "The Red Pencil" includes these right-of-center touchstones, it was written by noted liberal educator and education theorist Theodore Sizer.

Whenever Sizer writes about education, it's worth paying attention. His long career in the field includes stints as dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, chairman of the Coalition of Essential Schools, teaching at Brown University and more importantly as a principal in public and private schools. From these various vantage points he's viewed plenty of sausage making in American education and written extensively about it.

"The Red Pencil" is a lively romp through contested educational terrain. Sizer represents no established interest in these debates so his critique is free of the ideological baggage that forms the basis of many related books. It is intended to be at once a memoir, a series of notes and observations about American education based on experience and a cri de coeur for change.

Sizer decries "silences" about key educational issues; omissions that he argues paralyze the profession and lead to the paradox of "an often maudlin worship of the idea of universal schooling and a very faint heart in making it deserve that worship."

The three silences that most concern him involve a broader discussion of what learning really is and what influences it; questions of authority and who gets to exercise it, and what he characterizes as a "fetish" with order and systems that immediately renders most reforms impotent.

But these questions do show themselves noisily in a variety of contemporary education debates, though not enough for Sizer's taste. For instance, a dispute rages about whether it's appropriate to hold schools accountable for student achievement (as No Child Left Behind act demands). Similarly, charter schools are pushing the boundaries of how we think about the places where students learn. And of course, arguments over authority are a staple of American education and the centralizing tendencies of many reforms over the past 20 years provoke tremendous resistance and debate from both ends of the political spectrum.

But Sizer's book isn't just a litany of complaints. Perhaps most notably, "The Red Pencil" poignantly resurrects his 1968 voucher proposal. Though today's school choice debate obscures it, school vouchers were a fashionable idea among liberal intellectuals at the time.

In addition to the inequities and shortcomings he sees in today's approaches to financing schools, Sizer has little use for bureaucracy; schools are where the action is. That same belief feeds Sizer's disdain for standardized testing and makes him a celebrity among the small but vocal band working to dismantle No Child Left Behind.

But what Sizer would erect in place of No Child would unleash even more havoc among interest groups on the Democratic left than those policies do now. That's because Sizer's belief in schools as the center of control, dovetails nicely with libertarian and conservative political philosophy as well. So regardless of Sizer's contempt for No Child Left Behind, the National Education Association won't be citing this book as a road map for change.

That political tension between left and right is what makes "The Red Pencil" interesting. Aside from being an unusual book about schooling produced by a keen mind, it's neither conveniently right nor left in a debate that usually breaks down, however simplistically and unproductively, along those lines.

Andrew J. Rotherham is director of education policy at the Progressive Policy Institute and writes the blog Eduwonk.com.