Frustratingly Binary
3 stars
If you listen to the Have You Heard podcast, this book is going to be super predictable. It focuses largely on the GOP's push to dismantle US public schooling, and it focuses on Betsy DeVos more than anyone else. While DeVos definitely was responsible for harming schools, this has been a long process that has taken place over decades. It's frequently bipartisan, too.
The book has a strong liberal-conservative framework. Because of this, it smashes a lot of people into the same categories for the same reason without actually understanding the nuance behind beliefs. For example, they keep saying that people who want to dismantle public schools do so because they want to generate profit! Well, that's not true when you include people who want to dismantle public schools because they see school abolition as being part of the path to justice and freedom.
There's a lot of scare quotes …
If you listen to the Have You Heard podcast, this book is going to be super predictable. It focuses largely on the GOP's push to dismantle US public schooling, and it focuses on Betsy DeVos more than anyone else. While DeVos definitely was responsible for harming schools, this has been a long process that has taken place over decades. It's frequently bipartisan, too.
The book has a strong liberal-conservative framework. Because of this, it smashes a lot of people into the same categories for the same reason without actually understanding the nuance behind beliefs. For example, they keep saying that people who want to dismantle public schools do so because they want to generate profit! Well, that's not true when you include people who want to dismantle public schools because they see school abolition as being part of the path to justice and freedom.
There's a lot of scare quotes around words like "system," as if we're supposed to forget that schools are part of a system. The authors want you to not view schools in that light, and I think that actually hurts their argument more than it helps.
