Brill conceded that “the unions principally waited everyone out” and asserted that, “In public schooling, there are not any incentives, and the explanation there’s no change is that the employees principally get to assist elect their bosses.”
Nicely. The place to start?
First off, this is identical man who, when Race to the Prime was shiny and new, noticed it as a wondrous sport changer. As I put it again in a 2011 evaluation of Class Warfare, the ebook was “rife with the eagerness (and, alas, bathos) of a highschool sophomore’s diary.” Second, the reality is that schooling is replete with incentives—it’s simply that they’re typically perverse, compliance-oriented, or impediments to enchancment. (The truth that Brill nonetheless doesn’t get that is, let’s consider, telling.) Third, again when Brill was lovingly detailing the measures he now mocks and the Democratic officers who at the moment are yesterday’s information, he had no endurance for many who argued that lasting change required recalibrating the position of unions in operating colleges.
Again then, I famous that Brill bristled at Republican efforts to slender the scope of collective bargaining. I identified that:
Curiously, Brill reverses course in his conclusion—attacking Republican governors in Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin for difficult union affect by battling public sector collective bargaining. In a weird flip, Brill the fire-breathing union basher morphs right into a soft-spoken peacemaker who declares the unions invaluable companions in reform.
This was largely a product of Brill’s apparently reflexive dedication to the Democratic camp. As an illustration, whereas Democrats for Schooling Reform co-founder and Wall Road man Whitney Tilson loomed large in Brill’s telling (exhibiting up in his ebook’s index extra than three dozen instances), Republicans have been ignored once they weren’t being impugned. As I famous,
One is tough pressed to search out any point out of individuals like former Secretary of Schooling 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. That is college reform as seen from one nook of the political universe.
Then there’s the Brill contribution that I’ve all the time discovered most damning: His insistence on introducing the appellation “college reform denier” to the lexicon. My AEI colleague Max Eden put it aptly the opposite week:
Brill instructed a Manichean story of the holy and righteous “reformers” making an attempt to “reform” the system within the face of intransigence from the darkish and egocentric “anti-reformers.” To smear the “anti-reformers” he even went as far as label a few of them “college reform deniers”—with that phrase’s apparent overlay with Holocaust denial.
Max has it precisely proper. And simply who have been these deniers, anyway? Nicely, Brill by no means fairly defined. Largely, it appeared, the phrase was a catchy time period for lecturers unions and their allies. Besides that, unusually, Brill declared that he’d gotten to know and like American Federation of Academics chief Randi Weingarten and thought she needs to be named Chancellor of New York Metropolis’s colleges. Certainly, his entire shtick turned out remarkably fuzzy. As I famous again then in Schooling Week:
Even after ending his ebook, I’m not fully clear what Brill means when he labels somebody “anti-reform.” As an illustration, I feel good lecturers needs to be paid greater than unhealthy lecturers, however I’ve been vital of straightforward test-based bonus schemes. I feel value-added metrics primarily based on studying and math exams inform us one thing invaluable, however I’m skeptical of statewide analysis techniques that rely overmuch on these scores.
I might by no means fairly ensure whether or not all this made me “anti-reform” (a lot much less a “college reform denier”), but it surely appeared like the reply was sure. A giant a part of Brill’s downside is that he knew who he was for, however he didn’t actually know what he was for. And a whole lot of that has to do along with his final grasp of schooling being tenuous and episodic, and his disinterest in digging any deeper. The truth is, a lot of these whom Brill appeared to dismiss as “deniers” (or ignore altogether) have been those that’d really been making an attempt to tackle the heavy lifting and dysfunctional incentives lengthy earlier than they popped on his radar.
