Steven Brill
IN ,a reporting tour de force, award-winning journalist Steven Brill takes an uncompromising look at the adults who are fighting over Americaâ€™s failure to educate its childrenâ€”and points the way to reversing that failure. ,Brillâ€™s vivid narrativeâ€”filled with unexpected twists and turnsâ€”takes us from the Oval Office, where President Obama signs off on an unprecedented plan that will infuriate the teachersâ€™ unions because it offers billions to states that win an education reform â€œcontestâ€; to boisterous assemblies, where parents join the fight over their childrenâ€™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 Obamaâ€™s â€œcontestâ€ push bills that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. ,Itâ€™s the story of an unlikely armyâ€”fed-up public school parents, Ivy League idealists, hedge-funders, civil rights activists, conservative Republicans, insurgent Democratsâ€”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 Gatesâ€™s Microsoft and now forms a partnership with Bill and Melinda Gates to overhaul New Yorkâ€™s schools; a naÃ¯ve Princeton student who launches an army of school reformers with her senior thesis; a California teachersâ€™ union lobbyist who becomes the mayor of Los Angeles and then the unionâ€™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 nationâ€™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 Americaâ€™s schools.
Education,Nonfiction,Politics,Teaching,Adult,Audiobook,Sociology
Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools