Class Warfare

Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools

Steven Brill

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN:
  9781451612028
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In a reporting tour de force that made national headlines and The New York Times bestseller list, 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.

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 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Chapter 1: The Race
• Chapter 2: Juicy Words
• Chapter 3: The Epiphanies
• Chapter 4: “Be Obedient. Be Good. Keep Your Mouth Shut.”
• Chapter 5: “If an Unfriendly Foreign Power Had Attempted . . . ”
• Chapter 6: A “Hopelessly Naïve” Thesis
• Chapter 7: A Governor and a President Take Center Stage
• Chapter 8: Payroll to Payroll
• Chapter 9: Lighting Up the Capitol Switchboard
• Chapter 10: The Backlash
• Chapter 11: Schoolyard Classroom
• Chapter 12: The Discovery: “Good Teaching Matters”
• Chapter 13: The Network
• Chapter 14: No Child Left Behind
• Chapter 15: “Don’t Worry, It’s Just a Parent”
• Chapter 16: “The Union Won’t Allow It”
• Chapter 17: “The Idea Wasn’t Just to Keep Them from Killing Somebody”
• Chapter 18: “How Could the Democrats Be Against This?”
• Chapter 19: Seeing George Soros’s Apartment
• Chapter 20: New York Realities
• Chapter 21: “Our Party Has Got to Wake Up on This”
• Chapter 22: The Co-location Trap
• Chapter 23: Creating a New School System the Hard Way
• Chapter 24: “Colorado Says Half of You Won’t Graduate”
• Chapter 25: The Pol and the Moneymen
• Chapter 26: Foxes in the Henhouse
• Chapter 27: Mounting Evidence
• Chapter 28: “This Just Seemed So Obvious”
• Chapter 29: More Money, No Hassles
• Chapter 30: Building Harlem Success
• Chapter 31: “This Is Not a Self-Esteem Movement”
• Chapter 32: “You Really Don’t Want to Hire Me”
• Chapter 33: “Pulling the Rug Out”
• Chapter 34: Money Meets Data
• Chapter 35: Hillary for Teachers, Teachers for Hillary
• Chapter 36: Forward, Backward in New York
• Chapter 37: $45,000 Well Spent
• Chapter 38: “Faceless Bureaucracy”
• Chapter 39: Back in the Classroom
• Chapter 40: Quarantine the Data
• Chapter 41: Climbing the Ladder
• Chapter 42: Rhee’s Choice: Your Union or $130,000
• Chapter 43: Turning Around the USS Gates
• Chapter 44: The New Democrats
• Chapter 45: Two Returns to the Classroom
• Chapter 46: “Wake Up, Obama Just Talked About You”
• Chapter 47: “Inside Baseball”
• Chapter 48: “What Do You Guys Think You Could Do with a Hundred Billion?”
• Chapter 49: The Chosen Four
• Chapter 50: “They’ll Do Backflips”
• Chapter 51: “Things I Can’t Change from This Building”
• Chapter 52: Widgets
• Chapter 53: Agreement in Pittsburgh
• Chapter 54: The Opposite of Venture Capital
• Chapter 55: “Outcomes, Not Achievement”
• Chapter 56: “Obfuscating the Issue . . . Fooling the Reviewers”
• Chapter 57: A Shriek on Park Avenue
• Chapter 58: The Feinberg Gambit
• Chapter 59: School Reform: The Movie
• Chapter 60: Firing Everyone
• Chapter 61: “My Baby Is Reading”
• Chapter 62: Going Over to the Other Side
• Chapter 63: A “Baffling” Round One
• Chapter 64: “Varnish on a Sinking Ship”
• Chapter 65: Two Winners
• Chapter 66: Back on the Horse in Colorado
• Chapter 67: Billionaires Trapped in an Elevator
• Chapter 68: Rhee’s Breakthrough
• Chapter 69: “He Met with Everyone”
• Chapter 70: A New York Breakthrough—or Mirage?
• Chapter 71: Rocky Mountain High
• Chapter 72: “Honored, Humbled, Hopeful—and Horrified”
• Chapter 73: “She’s de Klerk in South Africa. We Have to Help Her.”
• Chapter 74: The Quiet Revolution
• Chapter 75: “Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire”
• Chapter 76: Klein’s and Mulgrew’s “Wonderful Negotiation”
• Chapter 77: From Inside Baseball to Public Accountability
• Chapter 78: “Arne, Here’s the Column You’ve Been Missing”
• Chapter 79: Soaring Dreams, Street-Level Politics
• Chapter 80: Rhee Rejected
• Chapter 81: “I’ll E-mail Your Dad and Tell Him”
• Chapter 82: The “Mujahideen” and the Moderates
• Chapter 83: Punch, Counterpunch
• Chapter 84: A Marathon, Not a Sprint
• Acknowledgments
• About Steven Brill
• Sources
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright