Wading into TNR's steel-cage educational policy deathmatch, he's taking on all comers:
For example (there are many), the book concludes: "Reformers imagine that is easy to create a successful school. It is not." This is complete nonsense. Nobody thinks it's easy to create a successful school, particularly when at-risk children are involved. I have heard dozens of reformers go on about this subject over the years. They're obsessed with the difficulty of building good schools, to the point, frankly, of being pretty hard to shut up about it. ...
Meanwhile, Richard, you write at length about the need to provide students with adequate health care. For years, you've asserted that school reform efforts are distracting from more important social welfare goals. Alas, if only President Obama hadn't been seduced by the promise of "miracle schools," he might have signed an expansion of the S-CHIP program into law and gambled his presidency on a massive effort to provide health care to the poor and uninsured. I guess we'll never know.
And you there -- what are you looking at? You want a piece of Carey too?