Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools [Hardcover]

Steven Brill (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 16, 2011

IN a reporting tour de force, award-winning journalist Steven Brill takes an uncompromising look at the adults who are fighting over America’s failure to educate its children—and points the way to reversing that failure.

Brill’s vivid narrative—filled with unexpected twists and turns—takes us from the Oval Office, where President Obama signs off on an unprecedented plan that will infuriate the teachers’ unions because it offers billions to states that win an education reform “contest”; to boisterous assemblies, where parents join the fight over their children’s schools; to a Fifth Avenue apartment, where billionaires plan a secret fund to promote school reform; to a Colorado high school, where students who seemed destined to fail are instead propelled to college; to state capitols across the country, where school reformers hoping to win Obama’s “contest” push bills that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

It’s the story of an unlikely army—fed-up public school parents, Ivy League idealists, hedge-funders, civil rights activists, conservative Republicans, insurgent Democrats—squaring off against unions that the reformers claim are protecting a system that works for the adults but victimizes the children.

Class Warfare is filled with extraordinary people taking extraordinary paths: a young woman who goes into teaching almost by accident, then becomes so talented and driven that fighting burnout becomes her biggest challenge; an antitrust lawyer who almost brought down Bill Gates’s Microsoft and now forms a partnership with Bill and Melinda Gates to overhaul New York’s schools; a naïve Princeton student who launches an army of school reformers with her senior thesis; a California teachers’ union lobbyist who becomes the mayor of Los Angeles and then the union’s prime antagonist; a stubborn young teacher who, as a child growing up on Park Avenue, had been assumed to be learning disabled but ends up co-founding the nation’s most successful charter schools; and an anguished national union leader who walks a tightrope between compromising enough to save her union and giving in so much that her members will throw her out.

Brill not only takes us inside their roller-coaster battles, he also concludes with a surprising prescription for what it will take from both sides to put the American dream back in America’s schools.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“With fresh color and a compelling storyline, Brill has managed to produce the seemingly impossible: an exciting book about education policy. . . . There is a lot to learn from Class Warfare. . . . Brill has a Woodwardian knack for getting people to tell him things they probably shouldn’t.” –Time

“[Brill] brings a sharp legal mind to the world of education reform. . . . [He] conveys the epiphanies, setbacks and triumphs of a national reform movement.” –The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Steven Brill is the CEO of Press+, which has created a new business model for journalism to flourish online. He teaches journalism at Yale and founded the Yale Journalism Initiative. Brill founded and ran The American Lawyer magazine, Court TV, and Brill’s Content magazine. He is the author of After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era and The Teamsters.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition (1 in number line) edition (August 16, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1451611994
• ISBN-13: 978-1451611991
• Product Dimensions: 1.5 x 6.5 x 9.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #352,207 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 54 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good Book for Policy Wonks. August 29, 2011

By Richard S. Dixon Jr.

Format:Hardcover

As a teacher for thirty-five years, I find Brill's book a great discussion of education policy in America. It is not really a book about, or concerning teachers, it's really about the development and administration of education policy. Still, this is a good book for teachers to read; it is a great book for administers to read. At any rate, I recommend it. I find Brill's style very readable and I admire the way he has threaded his way through the maze of issues involved in the world of education. To be sure, teachers' unions come off as huge obstructionists in the development of a workable and modern educational system. They are more concerned with their members than with students. But, that is the job of every union and, remember, without the unions there would not be things called weekends or sick leave or anything else resembling humane treatment of working people. I do not belong to a union, never have (except for a two-year stint working for the US gov't - AFGE). I have had thirty-five one-year contracts (or shorter!). I have been treated fairly and well. Others have not been so lucky. Brill does a good job in portraying the unions as not only obstructionist, but also necessary in this battle. Some charter school folks don't come off so well here, either.

One thing gripes me a bit about many of these characters portrayed here: not one seems to have taught for more than a couple of years, and yet they always know everything about teaching and need to tell everyone how right they are. Even Michelle Rhee, with whom I agree on many things, taught for a couple of years before she called it quits. Setting policy and supervising teachers IS much easier than teaching itself. That, for me, seems to be a quiet subtext of Brill's work.

If you are looking for a book on teaching, this is not the one. Look at the works of Alfie Kohn or Jonathan Kozol. Those are the real experts. But this book is a great history of the mess we find ourselves in wherever there are public schools, teachers' unions and administrators who think they know more than they really do.

61 of 76 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Race to the Top August 23, 2011

By templedelasol

Format:Hardcover

I loved Stephen Brill's article titled "Super Teachers are Not Enough" (Wall Street Journal), as well as his 'Rubber Room' article in the New Yorker. I did not love this book. It really is just about all the circumstances and people surrounding the Race to the Top bill and implementation. Most of the people he was profiling were millionaires who wanted to 'do good' by supporting ed reform/charter schools. I am a fourth grade public school teacher working in a Southern California barrio/ Title 1 school. It was hard to relate to the hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, and 'Yalies' he profiled. I couldn't help but feel it was all just a game for them and he was the designated cheerleader. I understand he has a pro-reform point of view but when he twice described a simple comment from Randi Weingarten as 'bragging' I felt his ship was dangerously listing to one side. He profiles one educator, Jessica Reid, a charter school teacher and all around teaching goddess. She stuns him by quitting because her lifestyle is not 'sustainable'. He makes a great point at the end that effective teaching is a marathon, not a sprint. I wanted to know more about this and hear from teachers who successfully balanced their lives while remaining effective. I was disappointed in the book overall. It was about as interesting as reading a play by play of a football game and he did not expand enough on his most interesting point (Super Teachers are Not Enough). I preferred The Bee Eater, a bio of Michelle Rhee. It is a much more compelling description of the ed reform movement. I am somewhere in the middle politically: a former NEA union rep who believes strongly in working hard to help my students achieve. I resent lazy teachers when I am working so hard (and we are getting paid the same), but I am also very grateful for my tenure (especially in this economy). I want to understand these issues more fully so that I can anticipate what is coming down the track which may effect my career. To some extent this book met that need, but it may be more interesting to those fascinated by ed policy rather than those in the trenches actually teaching.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Conflicting Signals January 2, 2012

By Marc Korman

Format:Hardcover

I found Class Warfare to be an engaging yet frustrating book with many conflicting signals. As most reviews of the book (here and in the press at the time of its release) indicate the author takes a strong position against the teachers unions for the majority of the book and then, in the conclusion, adopts a more conciliatory tone. The engaging part of the book is the tour it takes the readers on of a few different school systems, charter school efforts, and individuals seeking to reform education through reduced teacher tenure and process protections and increased evaluations. Some of the figures discussed are familiar such as former New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and former DC Superintendent Michelle Rhee. Others, such as Charter school evangelicals Eva Moskowitz, Jeff Canada, and Jessica Reid are less familiar though given the volume of books and documentaries discussing education reform as of late they are not totally unfamiliar. The book also takes us inside the Democrats for Education Reform organization and discusses its impact on the Obama Administration and No Child Left Behind.

The book has quite a few factual errors which an editor should have caught. John Edwards was a Senator from North Carolina (not South Carolina), Ferraro was the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee in 1984 (not 1988), a DC Council vote could not be 31-3 because the Council only has 13 members, and a "recent" term limits law in New York was from 1996. Those were the ones I knew about but who knows what else could be in there. Far more frustrating, and ironic given the book's conclusion, was the suspicion with which the author treated those outside the education reform movement. Every statement of motive of American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten or education historian Diane Ravitch was scrutinized and fact checked while it seemed like no anecdote by those on the other side was examined. A great example was near the beginning of the book where the author recounts Joel Klein's first day on the job as chancellor and one of the administrators not answering the phone because, to paraphrase, "it was just a parent calling to complain." It certainly could be a true story, but similar tales by those with which Klein (and the author) tend to disagree led to follow-up by the author and a conclusion that it could not be verified.

The book's conclusion is controversial but probably pragmatically correct. It takes a lot of teachers to serve our students and not all of them will be able to work the 20 hour days the gold standards Brill points to seem to work (or work until they burn out, as the book recounts). To "scale" education reform is going to require the involvement of those already teaching and to do so through an organized body, like a union, has a lot of benefit and has already been successful in some places, such as Colorado. An additional nitpick is the author's repeated dismissive attitude to Maryland's race to the top application with no explanation as to why the state was so undeserving (I'm from Maryland). The book spends a few pages on the Race to the Top evaluations which it concludes, based on quotes from reformers, did not reach correct conclusions because some pro-reform states such as Louisiana and Colorado were left out. I found the reformers distaste for the supposedly objective testing metric to be ironic, though I recognize they are not proposing an exact replica of a competitive grant program for teacher evaluations.

America's schools are a mixed bag and Brill gives an interesting, if largely one-sided (until the conclusion) of the past few years of reform efforts. It is a story that will continue.