The Trouble with Steven Brill's Black-and-White Worldview
by Frederick M. Hess • Aug 30, 2011 at 9:30 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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ShareSteven Brill's Class Warfare is a highly readable, fairly reliable, if incomplete history of contemporary efforts to "reform" American schooling. Kudos on the readability--there's way too little of that. The guy's a terrific writer and really captures the flavor of the debates. I don't think his small-bore errors are a big deal (it's tough to write 437 pages without making a few mistakes). And, while he omits much of consequence, every journalist or historian ultimately is forced to do that in shaping any tale.
But what drove me to distraction is the casual certainty with which he frames the whole question as being "pro-reform" or "anti-reform," and then labels individuals and views accordingly. It's especially problematic because Brill never actually explains what it means to be a "reformer." By page seven, he's talking about Race to the Top being "a call to the barricades for those [like Randi Weingarten] who had held back the reformers" without ever explaining what "reform" is.
I think RHSU readers know that the WaPo's Valerie Strauss and I disagree on much. But I still bristled when
