Brill conceded that “the unions basically waited everybody out” and asserted that, “In public education, there are no incentives, and the reason there’s no change is that the workers basically get to help elect their bosses.”
Well. Where to begin?
First off, this is the same guy who, when Race to the Top was shiny and new, saw it as a wondrous game changer. As I put it back in a 2011 review of Class Warfare, the book was “rife with the passion (and, alas, bathos) of a high school sophomore’s diary.” Second, the truth is that education is replete with incentives—it’s just that they’re often perverse, compliance-oriented, or impediments to improvement. (The fact that Brill still doesn’t get this is, shall we say, telling.) Third, back when Brill was lovingly detailing the measures he now mocks and the Democratic officials who are now yesterday’s news, he had no patience for those who argued that lasting change required recalibrating the role of unions in running schools.
Back then, I noted that Brill bristled at Republican efforts to narrow the scope of collective bargaining. I pointed out that:
Curiously, Brill reverses course in his conclusion—attacking Republican governors in Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin for challenging union influence by battling public sector collective bargaining. In a bizarre turn, Brill the fire-breathing union basher morphs into a soft-spoken peacemaker who declares the unions invaluable partners in reform.
This was in large part a product of Brill’s apparently reflexive commitment to the Democratic camp. For instance, while Democrats for Education Reform co-founder and Wall Street guy Whitney Tilson loomed huge in Brill’s telling (showing up in his book’s index more than three dozen times), Republicans were ignored when they weren’t being impugned. As I noted,
One is hard pressed to find any mention of people like former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, Thomas B. Fordham Institute president Chester E. Finn Jr., Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, or Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. This is school reform as seen from one corner of the political universe.
Then there’s the Brill contribution that I’ve always found most damning: His insistence on introducing the appellation “school reform denier” to the lexicon. My AEI colleague Max Eden put it aptly the other week:
Brill told a Manichean story of the holy and righteous “reformers” trying to “reform” the system in the face of intransigence from the dark and selfish “anti-reformers.” To smear the “anti-reformers” he even went so far as label some of them “school reform deniers”—with that word’s obvious overlay with Holocaust denial.
Max has it exactly right. And just who were these deniers, anyway? Well, Brill never quite explained. Mostly, it seemed, the phrase was a catchy term for teachers unions and their allies. Except that, strangely, Brill declared that he’d gotten to know and like American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten and thought she should be named Chancellor of New York City’s schools. Indeed, his whole shtick turned out remarkably fuzzy. As I noted back then in Education Week:
Even after finishing his book, I’m not entirely clear what Brill means when he labels someone “anti-reform.” For instance, I think good teachers should be paid more than bad teachers, but I’ve been critical of simple test-based bonus schemes. I think value-added metrics based on reading and math tests tell us something valuable, but I’m skeptical of statewide evaluation systems that rely overmuch on those scores.
I could never quite be sure whether all this made me “anti-reform” (much less a “school reform denier”), but it seemed like the answer was yes. A big part of Brill’s problem is that he knew who he was for, but he didn’t really know what he was for. And a lot of that has to do with his ultimate grasp of education being tenuous and episodic, and his disinterest in digging any deeper. In fact, many of those whom Brill seemed to dismiss as “deniers” (or ignore altogether) were those who’d actually been trying to take on the heavy lifting and dysfunctional incentives long before they popped on his radar.
