My essay on Steven Brill's new book, Class Warfare, is out in this week's Nation. The book is an impressive work in many ways; Brill does a great job at documenting the many financial, political, and personal connections that animate the standards-and-accountability school reform movement. And his thinking on charter schools and Teach for America has become more sophisticated and critical since his famous "rubber room" and "teachers' unions last stand" articles came out in 2009 and 2010.
That said, Class Warfare is filled with the sort of myopic, test-score-obsessed thinking that dominates far too much of the education conversation. I write:
School reform is just as much about the three Cs: curriculum (what knowledge and skills students actually learn); counseling (how we prepare young people,
