Sad to say, but this story is not the reality. Like anyone else, even teachers and administrators are often self-=interested. Teachers join unions (whose primary allegiance is to make teacher’s rewards greater), boards of ed care about public relations every bit as much as helping students, and politicians just want to say anything that will simulteneously help their electoral campaigns while not offending any special interest groups.

Joe Williams’s book is an investigative expose of this world of furtive self-interests that we call the public school system. He devotes chapters to every single group who dares to pay lip service to helping students while really playing self-interested politics as usual. The main targets are the predictable ones: the teachers unions and the politicians. The former is taken to task for putting effective strangle-holds on any attempts to try and introduce any kind of accountability into the teaching profession. The latter is called to account for their staggering ineptitude to do anything but spit tired rhetoric. Williams gives example after example of both groups failure to produce anything beneficial to the students.

A reviewer below takes the reporter to task for not being objective, fair, and balanced in his reporting. This is true… but it is true of all investigative journalism of this kind. In addition to his fact-presenting, Williams does opine quite a bit. But he never name-calls and, contrary to the below reviewer’s assertion, does not stump for any political party. (He takes republicans to task only a slight bit less than democrats.)

Really, Cheating Our Kids can and should be seen as a journalist’s confirmation of (what is called) public choice theory. Public choice theory boils down to the simple idea that government is every bit as self-interested as business people and should always be seen as such. Bureaucracies are generally self-serving and -perpetuating, politics is plagued by special interests (who look out for themselves rather than the good of all), and politicians care first and foremost about elections, rather than doing good. Anyone who likes this book and wants to explore the self-serving nature of bureacracies (of which the public schools are apotheoses), should read economist Ludwig von Mises’sBUREAUCRACY (Lib Works Ludwig Von Mises PB) or sociologist James Wilson’s Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do And Why They Do It (Basic Books Classics).

The reader should also be forewarned that the author speaks very highly of a voucher system and much of the book argues in favor of such an approach. I find it desirable, but others may be offput.

Rating: 4 / 5

Our schools will not be better, argues Williams, until parents have power in them. Parents will not have any power until they can control who gets the money for educating their kids. Williams is thus an enthusiastic supporter of school choice of all types.

What makes this book stand-out is its simplicity, bluntness and factual specificity. Williams is an education reporter, most of whose experience was in Milwaukee and New York City. He backs what he says with very specific horror stories. He writes in a way that makes the issues simple and easy to understand.

He also is very sensitive to how this issue cuts across the usual political lines. School choice, of course, is generally seen as a right-wing issue. Williams describes how it succeeded in Milwaukee only by creating a coalition of angry, black, poor parents — often very far to the Left in their thinking — united with business and right-wing types.
Rating: 5 / 5