Duncan’s heart is in the right place—he’s for kids and against lies—but the specifics of his analysis remain open to debate.
The former Secretary of Education makes an impassioned plea for school reform.
Don’t let the blandness of the title fool you. The first chapter is titled “Lies, Lies Everywhere,” and its first sentence is “Education runs on lies.” So who is doing the lying? According to Duncan, pretty much everyone involved with setting and maintaining educational standards or representing teachers or overseeing the buildings or using the issue of education as a political football. “The truth is that we not only don’t value our teachers,” he writes, after suggesting that teachers unions resist educational reform. “It’s that we don’t value our kids.” It’s hard to argue against schools putting kids first, though many of the policies advanced by the author when he was in the cabinet of his fellow Chicagoan, Barack Obama, proved far more contentious. Their program was called Race to the Top, and “it challenged some sacred cows of the left: namely, that the teachers’ unions were loath to cede any power when it came to deciding how to pay, train or evaluate teachers.” It also placed a premium on data for assessment and accountability, though the author’s conversational tone here stresses classroom interaction rather than numbers. He also insists that the emphasis on standardized testing and Common Core standards has been misunderstood, partly because of some communication failures. Education was plainly an Obama priority, and the numbers under Duncan were often impressive, as performance rose and dropouts decreased. Yet there was contention from the left, from unions that are generally considered a Democratic stronghold, and from the right, where Obama faced tea party resistance on practically every front. Those who play politics with education are missing the big picture, he writes: “This is not about test scores, knowledge, or even school. It’s about life.”
Duncan’s heart is in the right place—he’s for kids and against lies—but the specifics of his analysis remain open to debate.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7305-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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