The War Against Hope is a disturbing account of the corruption, greed, and skewed values that have assaulted our schools, betrayed our teachers, and forsaken our children for far too long.

This blurb on the back of Rod Paige's new book is odd coming from a man who played a significant role in master minding the 'Texas Miracle' scam that fueled forward George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind educational policy based on high-stakes testing. Paige, the superintendent of the Houston Independent School District at the time, and members of his administration cleverly promoted unethical teaching practices and manipulated the numbers, claiming that the drop-out rate of local schools was 1.5%, rather than the actual figure of over 40%. In addition, those students who were perceived as potentially lowering the overall test scores were retained in grades where testing was not required, especially ninth grade; or they were placed in special education classrooms or labeled Limited English Proficient and were thus exempted from taking the exam. Paige has yet to be prosecuted or even censured for his criminal behavior. On the contrary, the publishing giant McGraw-Hill, which has been making vast profits in the standardization craze nation wide, awarded him its highest honor for educators and invited him to be the keynote speaker at their Government Initiatives Conference. Shortly after, he was appointed Secretary of Education by President George W. Bush. If it's any indication of his ideological stance and function for the neoliberal rightwing, Paige also sits on the board of News Corporation-as in Rupert Murdoch and Fox News.

The War Against Hope opens with Paige participating in the plenary session of the 17th Annual Milken Family Foundation's National Education Conference. This is an interesting place to start a book on corruption and greed given that this organization was founded by Michael Milken of Knowledge Universe, the "Junk Bond King" who ripped off investors for billions of dollars in the 1980s and consequently spent a couple of years behind bars. But the book's chapters-"The Firestorm Competing Visions for American Education"; "Teachers' Unions-What They Are and How They Got that Way"; "Cutting Down Our Best Teachers and Slashing Their Pay"; "A Seat at Both Sides of the Negotiating Table"; "Union Corruption-Betraying Teachers"; "The Threat of Charter School Success"; "Visions for the Future"; "What We Must Do"; and "Reasons for Hope"-say nothing about how corporate greed has been the driving force behind public schooling since the 1970s, working through organizations like the Business Roundtable. Instead, throughout the book Paige argues "that the decline in our education system over the past several decades parallels the rise in influence of teachers' unions" (xiii) and insists that unions' "major goal is to collect union dues" (xiii). Now back in reality, these dues in sum are child's play compared to the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on public education in the U.S. annually that corporate profiteers skim out of the public system through contracting, privatization, and commercialism. But there's not a word about this in Paige's account of organized labor and the plight of public education: only praise for what is really a 'no corporation left behind' agenda that does "hurt children, hinder teachers, and endanger public education."

Without giving a solid history of the development and the strengths and weaknesses of teachers unions, honestly engaging the research that contests his claims around things like the 'success' of charter schools, or explaining why the current administration has under funded NCLB by some 40 billion dollars, the book rambles using 'shock' examples to concoct a pejorative depiction of progressive theory and practice. Just as the Reagan Administration's Commission on Excellence in Education-intent on privatizing all public institutions and resources-used the old Cold War tactic of fear of communism and the 'evil empire' in its 1983 report A Nation at Risk, within the new post-911 discourse of fear, Paige referred to the NEA as a "terrorist organization." Everyone who has ever had any experience with public education or the private sector knows that unions provide a crucial check on abusive management practices and the excesses of punitive policies. Charter schools are finding, for example, that without unions to protect teachers there are unintended negative consequences like high turnover rates, which in turn adversely affects schooling.

Though The War Against Hope does not offer honesty, quality analysis, or even a decent read, it does provide readers the opportunity to see this powerful education business sector and the old-boy networks therein and their pedagogy of diversion, fear, and scapegoating. A critical reading of the book offers a sordid view of the synergy that exists among government, corporations, and the media and of how this force has been controlling public education in the U.S. to the detriment of its people. It is from this position of awareness that activists can better mobilize against these forces if they are really intent on democratizing schools through the active inclusion of parents, teachers, organized labor, and communities.

Recommended reading/viewing:

CNN Presents (2005). High Stakes. Cable News Network Inc. Lanham, MD: CNN.

Gluckman, A. (2002). Testing…Testing…One, Two, Three: The Commercial Side of the Standardized-Testing Boom.Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice, January/February. Available at:  http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2002/0102gluckman.html

Haney, W. (2000). The Texas Miracle in Education: Missing Students and Other Mirages. Education Policy Analysis Archives, Vol. 8, No. 41. Available at:  http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n41/ and  http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n41/part5.htm

Humes, E. (2003). Leave No Test Behind. Available at:  http://www.edwardhumes.com/archives/00000021.shtml