On Civility In Educational Debate
Steven Brill entitled his latest column for Reuters, a long denunciation of teacher unions, “The School Reform Deniers.” Brill’s rhetorical purpose in associating the term ‘deniers’ with those in teacher unions who disagree with his vision of education reform is clear: it is a word most commonly associated with ‘holocaust deniers,’ those who deny that the Nazis carried out a genocide against European Jews during the course of World War II, killing six million.
Would that this rhetorical style was limited to the title of Brill’s piece, and not a constant thread throughout it and his book. A number of the flaws in the Reuters piece are laid out here by Deborah Meier, Diane Ravitch, and Jennifer Jennings, among others.
It is to the credit of the Fordham Foundation’s Mike Petrilli that he calls out Brill on the title of this essay. It is an