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Class Warfare:  Inside the fight to Fix America's Schools, Steven Brill's ethically challenged, error ridden, incoherent yet highly illuminating love letter to the corporate education reformers bent on privatizing public education, is an extraordinary and illuminating document and one that, in a sane world, could easily serve as an indictment against the very process and people it was written to lionize. Perhaps, in time, that day will come. Perhaps, indeed, it is closer than we think. In the main, Class Warfare tells the tragic and true story of how a handful of extraordinarily wealthy and ruthless private citizens in league with their corporate and political allies have been able to undermine the democratic process in order to try to remake the public school system in their image:  that is to say, to remake it as another cog in the wheel of the ever more destructive unregulated free market which has brought the globe to the brink of chaos and profited no one but  themselves.

Over the objections of teachers' unions and many Democrats, Louisiana's Republican governor and GOP-controlled legislature have crafted one of the most exhaustive education overhauls of any state in the country, through measures that will dramatically expand families' access to public money to cover the costs of both private school tuition and individual courses offered by a menu of providers. A pair of bills championed by Gov. Bobby Jindal, which he is expected to sign into law, will expand a state-run private-school-voucher program beyond New Orleans to other academically struggling schools around the state, give superintendents and principals direct control over personnel decisions, and set much higher standards for awarding teachers tenure.

If you're an educator, a parent, a student or anyone who cares about public education, you should know that ALEC, the radical conservative lobbying group, is eyeing your throat. The American Legislative Exchange Council has been drawing drams of lifeblood from the public school system for decades, but now that it has disbanded its controversial Public Safety and Elections Task Force (read "More Guns and Fewer Democratic Voters Committee") it is expected to redouble its efforts to decrease local control of schools by parents and elected school boards, privatize public school jobs, funnel public dollars to private entities, and limit or destroy the collective bargaining rights educators rely on to advocate for students.

My post the other day was intended to shed light on the various complexities of classifying charter schools as public or private. Some have argued that the distinctions I make are a distraction from the bigger policy issues. The point was not to address those issues, but rather to dispose of the misinformed rhetoric that charter schools are necessarily public in every way that traditional public schools are. They clearly are not. And the distinctions made in my previous post have important implications not only for teachers employment rights (or any school employee), but also for student rights. Further, it is really, really important that teachers considering their options and parents considering their options understand these distinctions and make fully informed choices.

Rudy Crew has had an eventful career in education. He's run two of the four largest school districts in the United States-New York City in the 1990s and Miami-Dade County from 2004 to 2008-where he initiated ambitious policies and programs but left amid controversy. In New York, he took over and rejuvenated some of the city's poorest-performing schools, but was forced out in 1999 after clashing with then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. In Miami, Mr. Crew offered salary increases to teachers who would transfer to the worst schools and got more students to take Advanced Placement tests. But in 2008, the same year he was named National Superintendent of the Year by the American Association of School Administrators, he was fired after a long, escalating spat with the school board. Since then, he's worked as an education consultant with Global Partnership Schools, which he co-founded, and is teaching at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. Last month, Mr. Crew, 61, was named president of Revolution K12, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based provider of adaptive-learning software in math and English. Education Week Staff Writer Jason Tomassini spoke with Mr. Crew last week in a telephone interview about his move into the educational technology marketplace, the differences between the public and private sectors, and the changing role of teachers in the classroom.

If rating teachers based on standardized test scores was such a brilliant revelation for improving the quality of the teacher workforce, if getting rid of tenure and firing more teachers was clearly the road to excellence, and if standardizing our curriculum and designing tests for each and every component of it were really the way forward, we'd expect to see these strategies all over the home pages of web sites of leading private independent schools, and we'd certainly expect to see these issues addressed throughout the pages of journals geared toward innovative school leaders, like Independent School Magazine.  In fact, they must have been talking about this kind of stuff for at least a decade. You know, how and why merit pay for teachers is the obvious answer for enhancing teacher productivity, and why we need more standardization… more tests… in order to improve curricular rigor?  So, I went back and did a little browsing through recent, and less recent issues of Independent School Magazine and collected the following few words of wisdom

In confronting any other national security threat, the U.S. wouldn't trust unreliable and unproven solutions. We would go with what works. Why, then, do some in the education sector insist we gamble on the privatization of our public schools? A new report from the Council on Foreign Relations, written by Joel I. Klein and Condoleezza Rice, rightly identifies a problem in our nation's education system, namely, that we are not educating our students well enough to maintain our country's economic vitality, international competitiveness or vibrant democracy. The report argues that this, in turn, poses a national security risk. But simply encouraging more competition, choice, and privatization within our nation's schools, as Klein and Rice advocate, does not constitute the systemic, scalable or sustainable solution that our country needs or that the report claims to present. The dissenting opinions included with the report criticize the authors' policy recommendations for promoting a reform agenda that is based on inconclusive evidence and that fails to address the serious issue of inequity in education funding and opportunity.

Our fight for public schooling is a fight for democracy, for one-for-all-and-all-for-one solutions to our problems. But what is this democracy idea? Or as the Occupiers say: "What does democracy look like"? We need to use schools to sell democracy-even to explain it! It doesn't just live on neglected and compromised. Even many of our parental allies seem content to view public education as a private concern for their kids' futures. Period. In such a world the only thing that matters is rank order and, as I used to remind colleagues, no matter how fast kids line up, there's always just one in the front all the way back to one at the end. We're fighting each other these days to see if by hook or crook we can get "ours" nearer the front. (And "cutting" the line is allowed.) We live, too many of us, in a climate that makes us all compete for the shortage of private goods rather than tackling the "shortage" issue.

The type of clothing worn in a family's home, the language spoken and other cultural markers could influence whether special-education students receive taxpayer-funded private-school tuition, under a bill passed last month by the New York state Legislature. Education officials would have to consider a student's "home environment and family background" when deciding the best setting for special-education children under the bill. Currently, decisions about private-school placement have generally been based on academics and the child's disability.

The list of initiatives reads like a grand plan to dismantle public education as we know it: Slash education spending. Outsource public teachers. Curb collective bargaining rights. Kneecap teachers' unions. Open the floodgates to charter and "cyber" schools. Welcome to education reform in the state of Michigan, where a Republican-dominated legislature and a GOP governor are pushing one of the broadest anti-union, pro-privatization agendas in the country.

It is a view as ubiquitous as it is simplistic: To improve public education, pay teachers more-a lot more. Union officials, education reformers, scholars, laypeople, and politicians of all stripes endorse this principle in one form or another. However, as we determined in a study released Nov. 1, 2011, by the Heritage Foundation, "Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers," the average public school teacher already is paid more than what he or she is likely to earn in the private sector. Although some may well be underpaid, the typical public school teacher makes roughly $1.52 for every dollar made by a private-sector employee with similar skills.

Private for-profit institutions have been the fastest growing part of the U.S. higher education sector. For-profit enrollment increased from 0.2 percent to 9.1 percent of total enrollment in degree-granting schools from 1970 to 2009, and for-profit institutions account for the majority of enrollments in non-degree granting postsecondary schools. We describe the schools, students, and programs in the for-profit higher education sector, its phenomenal recent growth, and its relationship to the federal and state governments. Using the 2004 to 2009 Beginning Postsecondary Students (BPS) longitudinal survey we assess outcomes of a recent cohort of first-time undergraduates who attended for-profits relative to comparable students who attended community colleges or other public or private non-profit institutions. We find that relative to these other institutions, for-profits educate a larger fraction of minority, disadvantaged, and older students, and they have greater success at retaining students in their first year and getting them to complete short programs at the certificate and associate degree levels. But we also find that for-profit students end up with higher unemployment and "idleness" rates and lower earnings six years after entering programs than do comparable students from other schools, and that they have far greater student debt burdens and default rates on their student loans.

Privatizing the government is one of the most active projects of the early 21st century. Everything we once expected the government to do - from education to regulatory rule-writing to military operations to healthcare services to prison management - it now does less of, preferring to support markets in which these services are done through independent, profit-maximizing agents. Tools such as contracting out, vouchering and the selling-off of state assets have been used to remake the government during our market-worshipping era.

We find robust evidence of a decline in enrollment in private schools, but the effect is only modest in size.

Indiana created one of the nation's most aggressive private school voucher programs -- and Hoosier parents took advantage in record numbers. The Indiana Department of Education announced Thursday that 3,919 students signed up and received more than $16 million in state-funded vouchers to attend private schools statewide. That is more vouchers than any state has ever provided in its first year.

This report compares the pay, pension costs and retiree health benefits of teachers with those of similarly qualified private-sector workers. The study concludes that teachers receive total compensation 52% greater than fair market levels, which translates into a $120 billion annual "overcharge" to taxpayers. Built on a series of faulty analyses, this study misrepresents total teacher compensation in fundamental ways. First, teachers' 12% lower pay is dismissed as being appropriate for their lesser intelligence, although there is no foundation for such a claim. Total benefits are calculated as having a monetary value of 100.8% of pay, while the Department of Labor disagrees, giving a figure of 32.8%-a figure almost identical to that of people employed in the private sector. Pension costs are valued at 32%, but the real number is closer to 8.4%. The shorter work year is said to represent 28.8% additional compensation but the real work year is only 12% shorter. Teachers' job stability is said to be worth 8.6%, although the case for such a claim is not sustained. In sum, this report is based on an aggregation of such spurious claims. The actual salary and benefits for teachers show they are in fact undercompensated by 19%.

One of the signature issues of the Obama administration's education reform strategy is "turning around" low-performing schools. We have been led to believe that schools with low test scores can be dramatically changed by firing the principal, replacing half or all the staff, closing the school or turning the school over to private management. Part of the corporate reformers' message is that turning around a school may be painful but that it can produce transformational results, such as a graduation rate of 100 percent or a startling rise in test scores. The turnaround approach assumes that it is bad principals and bad teachers who stand in the way of school improvement. Any mention of poverty or other social and economic conditions that might affect students' motivation and academic performance is dismissed as excuse-making by the proponents of "No Excuses." Today there is a burgeoning industry of private-sector consultants devoted to "turnarounds." One of the leading turnaround specialists is a company called Mass Insight. I recently received an email in which Mass Insight hailed several schools that had turned around. The stories seemed too good to be true.

Legislation signed by Gov. Chris Christie will allow private schools in struggling districts to become charter schools. In this case it works just like vouchers where the money follows the child to the private school that the parent chooses.

In Silicon Valley, Bullis elementary school accepts one in six kindergarten applicants, offers Chinese and asks families to donate $5,000 per child each year. Parents include Ken Moore, son of Intel Corp.'s co-founder, and Steven Kirsch, inventor of the optical mouse. Bullis isn't a high-end private school. It's a taxpayer- funded, privately run public school, part of the charter-school movement that educates 1.8 million U.S. children. While charters are heralded for offering underprivileged kids an alternative to failing U.S. districts, Bullis gives an admissions edge to residents of parts of Los Altos Hills, where the median home is worth $1 million and household income is $219,000, four times the state average.

"The Wall Street Journal this morning failed to report ties between the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and controversial "parent-trigger" legislation that would allow parents to take over and convert public schools to charter schools. They also failed to report that the Journal's parent company, News Corp, is a member of ALEC. The Journal's treatment of the legislation also cited no criticism of the proposal, which has been described as an effort "to manipulate parents into letting [the charter school lobby] privatize more public schools."