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The War Against America's Public Schools: Privatizing Schools, Commercializing Educationreviewed by Patrick J. McEwan - 2002 Title: The War Against America's Public Schools: Privatizing Schools, Commercializing Education Author(s): Gerald W. Bracey Publisher: Allyn and Bacon, Needham Heights, MA ISBN: 0321080734 , Pages: 288, Year: 2001 Search for book at Amazon.com Gerald Bracey doesn’t mince words. There is a war,
he argues, being waged against public schools. Its generals
are Chester Finn, Eric Hanushek, Milton Friedman, and Paul
Peterson. They plot strategy in darkened chambers of the
Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution, arming their
minions in the financial press with jumbled statistics and specious
overstatements. Their goal is to privatize, commercialize,
and ultimately destroy public education (and presumably the
American Federation of Teachers if it stumbles into the
melee). In this book, The War Against America's Public
Schools, Gerald Bracey mounts a nine-chapter defense that is
forceful and occasionally thought provoking, but not always
convincing.
Chapter 1 describes the conservative forces arrayed against
public schools. This is familiar territory for casual
observers of the “school choice” debate, but Bracey
presents it with a vigor that occasionally lapses into
paranoia. The Spencer Foundation is—a little
bizarrely—described as a conservative foundation that is not
“neutral” or “idea-oriented” (p. 4).
Whipping boys like William Bennett are rightly chastised for
mangling statistical data—do we ever... (preview truncated at 150 words.)To view the full-text for this article you must be signed-in with the appropriate membership. Please review your options below:
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- Patrick McEwan
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign E-mail Author PATRICK J. McEWAN is an Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include the economics of education and education policy in Latin America.
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