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Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools
Simon & Schuster
August 2011
On Sale: August 16, 2011
496 pages
ISBN: 1451611994
EAN: 9781451611991
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.
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