What You Should Know About the War Against America's Public Schools

Rating:
Summary: He should be ashamed of himself
Review: A sad attempt to defend an indefensiable system by trying o obfuscate and cloud the very clear picture of what is wrong and how it got that way. When Bracey is described as fighting against the tide, this is more than accurate. It should perhaps be changed to desperately trying to fight agaoinst the tide of needed reform through an insistance that no one can prove to him what has been clearly demmonstratewd time and time again. Bracey has made something of a cottage industry of this sad endevour. There seem to be some people out there who want to hear that everything is not as it seems. It is and children are being damaged for the sake of saving the percs of adults. The sadest thing is that stopping reform has not gotten teachers more money or respect. They could gain both in a system that worked.

Read the Rand, Brookings or Hoover institues literature on the subject if you want to get a clearer idea of the already full grown consenus on this issue and the facts that back it up.

Rating:
Summary: The Title Says it All
Review: As a school board director in Pennsylvania, I recommended this book for purchase to the public library and for perusal by my colleagues on my board and our superintendent. Bracey names names-- telling you where all the bodies are buried. The fact that a good number of them are in Pennsylvania was a bonus to this reader. But regardless of which state you are in, this book is important to anyone who is interested in public education.

My only criticism is that the author's writing style is uneven at times. This book could have befitted by an additional sweep of copy editing especially in the more complicated passages dealing with statistics. But that being said, there is more to recommend than not.

Public education is under attack. It is a two-pronged attack from the Christian conservatives and the neocons who want to privatize everything. This I already knew. But this book made me aware of the master myth used against public education-the myth that money doesn't matter. This sounded crazy to me that anyone could actually believe this until I encountered a conservative at a party, and he boldly asserted that money doesn't matter-as thought, everyone knows this as a given fact.

Of course money matters. That was the whole point of the Brown Decision 50 Years ago. And yet, this is the starting point of all of the assumptions employed by the enemies of public education. With this premise in place, they embraced any set of numbers that supported their bias. Bracey explains in great detail how the right lies with statistics-for example, how international tests compare kids who are different ages, years of education and exclusive sampling pools when compared to our American model, which is inclusive. This is how we get headlines that we are number 19 in the world! Every reporter who covers the education beat should read this book along with taking a refresher course in statistics.

The movement to make schools accountable by using high stakes testing was an agenda pushed by the conservative right in an attempt to get vouchers with the hope of eventually totally privatizing education--anything but public education. Now that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has put the high stakes testing model in place in all 50 states, enter the law of unintended consequences. Taking the numbers provided by NCLB, we now that we have national numbers that are falling into the pattern any reasonable person could have predicted. Rich districts succeed while poor districts struggle at best and fail at worst. In other words, money does matter.

Rating:
Summary: No American can afford not to have this book
Review: Bracey's work is thorough and very well documented. Contrary to what his critics say, Bracey doesn't try to portray a public education system free of problems- he strips away the myths surrounding public schools and puts the reader on a sound footing for REAL debate.

Rating:
Summary: Catholic schools in poor neighborhoods?
Review: Money does matter, but it is not the cure here. In inner cities public schools can spend up to three times the amount spent by catholic schools per student. Yet catholic schools consistantly outperform public schools across the board - reading, writing, social studies, science and math. For example, 80% of NY catholic school high school students are able to pass at least one regents exam, compared to 2% of public high school students. Come on, lets stop denying the obvious and focus on fixing a sick, cruel system failing kids whose only chance is education.