Class Warfare

In a reporting tour de force, award-winning journalist Steven Brill takes an uncompromising look at the adults who are fighting over America's failure to educate its children and points the way to reversing that failure. Brill's vivid narrative -- filled with unexpected twists and turns -- takes us from the Oval Office, where President Obama signs off on an unprecedented plan that will infuriate the teachers' unions because it offers billions to states that win an education reform "contest"; to boisterous assemblies, where parents join the fight over their children'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 Obama's "contest" push bills that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. It's the story of an unlikely army -- fed-up public school parents, Ivy League idealists, hedge-funders, civil rights activists, conservative Republicans, insurgent Democrats -- squaring off against unions that the reformers claim are protecting a system that works