Steven Brill - Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools

Praise for Class Warfare

As an inside account of the Obama administrations moves to fix schools, Class Warfare is superb.... Brills access to key playersthe famous and the not-so-famousallows him to give readers privileged glimpses into various meetings that were seldom reported on but had great impact on the thrust of reform.

The Washington Post

A deeply reported work on the state of the school reform movement in the United States, written in dense bursts that give color to both policy and people.

The Daily Beast

Brills approach resembles Bob Woodwards recent volumes on the real wars of the Bush and Obama eras: plenty of inside scoops, vivid quotes, extensive reportage, evocative vignettes and telling examples, lots of short chapters, a fast-paced narrative, and an ample supply of couldnt-invent-em characters.... Its a rollicking romp... it works through many issues, conflicts, interests, episodes, and people and comes to a measured set of conclusions that wont please anyone in particular but deserve serious reflection.

The Education Gadfly

An in-depth, impeccably researched examination of the education-reform movements that have swept America over the last several decades, as well as the obstacles theyve faced.... The author tackles this beast of a topic admirably, creating a lucid, often riveting history that will be invaluable to the next generation of reformers.

Kirkus Reviews

Many parents, even those who are educators, may not be aware of the battles that occur daily in the education world. This is a fascinating look at those struggles and at the people who determine how Americas children will be educated.... Brills multilayered account of the education dilemma... brings hope that change for the better could be on the horizon.

Library Journal

A superb book... Fun to read.

CNNMoney.com

His writing is crisp, even breathless at times, with the zeal of a recent convert. His insider stories of the politics of education reform are fascinating.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Brills book is one of the most in-depth and closely researched looks into the modern workings of the education blob in recent memory.

CNN.com

Class Warfare is a gripping account of the fierce combat between reformers and their opponents... Brill generally does a remarkable job of weaving the lives and experiences of students, teachers, and officials into a coherent story.

Foreign Affairs

Within the first few pages I was taking the book everywherethe supermarket checkout line, the dinner table, the movies. It is funny, exciting, surprising and deep.

Jay Mathews, The Washington Post

Steven Brills Class Warfare is hard-hitting, illuminating, and as fast-paced and gripping as a thriller. His vivid accounts of great teachers at workand his play-by-play of the battle to remove the obstacles put in front of them by their own unionchanged my outlook about the possibilities for American education. A must-read call to action for all thinking Americans, especially parents.

Amy Chua, John M. Duff Jr. Professor of Law, Yale University, and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and Day of Empire

Class Warfare inspires! This is a unique and critically important story about true heroes in America who against great odds are making a real difference. More than this, Brills work sheds important light on the educational disparities faced by low-income communities across the country and through his work he trumpets what should be a call to action by all of us.

Cory A. Booker, Mayor of Newark, NJ

An extraordinarily well-researched and compelling account of the tectonic shifts in school politics over the past several years. This is a masterpiece, both as history and as a catalyst for continued change. Far from the usual one-sided account the subject typically engenders, Brills work is balanced, sophisticatedand, amazingly, a real page-turner.

Chris Christie, Governor of New Jersey

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INSIDE
THE FIGHT
TO FIX
AMERICAS
SCHOOLS

To Emily, Sophie, Samand Cynthia

January 29, 2009, 1:15 p.m.,
Oval Office, the White House

As he filed into the Oval Office behind the power players who were already household names in Washingtontop presidential adviser David Axelrod, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, and Secretary of Education Arne DuncanJon Schnur thought that he had spent years waiting to have this meeting. Until now he had been jilted. The Democrats he had worked for had always backed away from the education reforms he championed. And they hadnt been elected.

Schnur, then forty-three, got interested in education when, as an editor of his high school newspaper, he read a draft of an article by a student who had transferred from a Milwaukee public school to his school in the citys suburbs. She was savvier than any of us on the editorial board, but the draft was just so terribly written, he says. The more I got to know her, the more I became obsessed with why public education hadnt reached people like her.

After he graduated from Princeton, where he had volunteered as a tutor in a nearby high school, Schnur worked in Bill Clintons presidential campaign, then landed an education policy job in his administration.

That was when Schnur started to distrust his assumptions about why American public education had collapsed to a point where it was an obstacle to the American dream rather than the enabler. As he studied research trickling in by the late 1990s, he began to believe that failure or success in Americas schoolrooms, especially in its poorest communities, didnt depend mostly on what kind of home a child came from or whether the school had enough resources, which is what most liberals like Schnur had always assumed. Instead, he concluded, it had to do more with the teacher in front of the class. Truly effective teaching, he came to believe, could overcome student indifference, parental disengagement, and povertyand, in fact, was the key to enabling children to rise above those circumstances.

However, as the studies and the reports from a new kind of public school called charter schools were finding, successful teaching was grueling work. It required more talent, more preparation, more daily reevaluation and retooling, more hours in the class day, and just plain more perseverance than many teachers, and most teachers union contracts, were willing or able to provide. In Schnurs view, the unions and those who ran the nations increasingly bureaucratic school systems had settled on low expectations for children, which allowed them not to be held accountable when the children continued to fail. Change those expectations; put good, determined teachers and principals in there; retrain or, if necessary, remove those who were not effective; and demography will no longer be destiny, Schnur and his fellow reformers believed. That presented a dilemma if you were a Democrat, because the Democratic Party had come to rely on teachers unions as its strongest base of support.