A vigorous, well-informed broadside against the marketization of the education system in the U.S.
A stern warning about the conservative agenda to tear down the public education system.
Schneider and Berkshire, hosts of the education podcast Have You Heard, present a cogent argument against the ongoing assault on our public schools as an institution. For decades now, there has been a movement to make education something families should be able to shop for, be it public, private, parochial, charter, virtual, or home-schooling. The authors examine the ideological roots of the movement and the core policies of the dismantling agenda. They believe that the conservative animus against public education is caused by its high tax cost in state budgets, the unionization of its workforce, the generally progressive curriculum, and the host of regulations and attendant bureaucracy. Curiously, the authors do not consider in much depth the roles of bigotry and classism within the traditions of local control, taxpayer support, and open access, but they offer particularly good explanations of neo-vouchers—“a cottage industry of fraud and chaos,” in one reporter’s words—education savings accounts, scam-laden building leases and management fees, and the private-governance model for charter schools. They also deliver a rather dire picture of the role of teachers, all of whom are underpaid, especially in the virtual-learning environment, where educators are reduced to helpers who will inevitably find their way into the gig economy. Consequently, if you don’t have to pay union wages for teachers, you will free up money for advertising, which will become an increasingly expensive part of the school picture as various school types compete for student tuition dollars. Some progressives, too, have shown their anxiousness to “forc[e] competition on a public education monopoly,” which shadows the conservative argument that “if the taxpayer is paying for the education”—as in charter schools—“it’s public education.”
A vigorous, well-informed broadside against the marketization of the education system in the U.S.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-62097-494-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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