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“A stunning indictment!” --- John Stossell, ABC
News
“Peter
Brimelow demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that
the teacher unions, through their control of the
government education monopoly, are the major source of
the gross deficiencies in our government school system.
He makes a persuasive case that real education reform
requires introducing competition through vouchers and
other means and eliminating the legal privileges that
are the major source of the unions’ enormous political
and economic power.”
– Milton
Friedman, Nobel Economics Laureate
Peter Brimelow
(click
here for mildly flattering photograph) is President
of the
Center For American Unity, a Senior Fellow of the
Pacific Research Institute and an editor of
VDARE.COM (which focuses on issues raised in his
immigration policy
book and has NOTHING to do with education.) A career
financial journalist, Brimelow is also a columnist
writing about arcane investment questions for CBS
MarketWatch - archived
here. His work for Forbes Magazine is
erratically archived
here.
email Peter Brimelow
peter@bashtheworm.com
An Offer To VDARE.COM Readers...
Reviews
 | Peter Brimelow Reviews Reviews:
Izzy Lyman Interview Peter Brimelow
writes: Purely journalistically, this is an
excellent interview covering much ground very
efficiently. Izzy Lyman's
Homeschooling Revolution blog
is a real power, judging from the number of visitors
that VDARE.COM gets from it. Internet 1, Established
Media 0 (not for the first time). We're trying to
persuade her to write for us! |
|
Peter Brimelow Reviews
Reviews: FrontPageMagazine.com's
Chris Arabia
Peter Brimelow
comments:
A friendly review from
David Horowitz's webzine - a veteran of the Ed Wars,
and a reason why the NEA and the whole Educrat Blob
is toast: the opposition is organized. (Unlike
immigration reform, but it's coming). Chris echoes
the general feeling that my style is too flip. My
reaction: (a) this is a very BORING (compared to
immigration) subject. It needs some levity. (b) my
diversity-is-strength immigrant view: British
journalists think American journalists are earnest
bores. (c) they (the teacher reps at the NEA
National Assembly) ARE fat!!! But
maybe I'm wrong... |
| Peter Brimelow Reviews the Washington Post's Jay
Matthews (Again, More Critically)
Peter Brimelow
comments: there's a startling difference
between the Washington Post's Jay
Matthews in print (here), on the
web, and
especially in person at the
Cato Institute. My theory: there's an inner circle effect in much
intellectual activity, and outsiders are not
welcome, particularly when they want to talk about
something new i.e. law and economics rather than
pedagogy, especially in the snootiest sanctums -
e.g. the hallowed pages of the
Washington
Post print edition. Similarly, my
book on
Canadian politics was never reviewed by
the main U.S. Canadian studies journal, although it
has actually turned out to be
right on
all the major trends. Grade: N/A, because this
isn't a review but a polite evasion - and,
hey, because Jay was generous elsewhere!
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Peter Brimelow Reviews
Reviews: Tom Bethell in American Spectator
Peter Brimelow writes:
Tom Bethell's trademark
discursive
essay style (harder than it looks) applied to the
Hoover Institution's Koret Task Force on K-12
Education.
This is where the teacher unions come in. If you
want to go straight to the generous reference to
WORM, click here. Grade: A. |
|
John O'Sullivan reviews Worm in the Apple in the Chicago Sun-Times
- James Fulford writes: Since John O’Sullivan
is the godfather of Peter Brimelow’s son
Alexander Frank Brimelow, the
much-commented on young man to whom Alien
Nation is dedicated, Peter Brimelow recused
himself from reviewing this review. I give it an A+,
for focusing the main economic point: productivity
goes down while spending goes up.
Take class size, for example.
Your local board of education will ask for an increase
in taxes to lower teacher-pupil ratios, and issue
self-congratulatory press releases when they’ve done
it. What they
won’t be able to do is show that the students are
better off.
It’d be like General Motors boasting
to their shareholders that they are hiring more
people to make fewer cars, which may or may not
run. |
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Roger Hedgecock on the Rush Limbaugh Show,
Friday, May 9, 2003 -
Peter Brimelow writes: it's a fascinating
commentary on the sheer power of talk radio in
general, and Rush Limbaugh's show in particular, that
this terse albeit incisive comment by Roger Hedgecock,
subbing for Rush that day, propelled WORM
to
its highest point yet on the Amazon's all-inclusive
sales rankings - #30. My appearance on the
O'Reilly Factor produced
the previous record - #41. I can't listen to radio
and write at the same time, so many thanks to
VDARE.COM readers for reporting this. |
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David
Orland for Focus On The Family
-
Peter Brimelow
writes: The Teacher Trust and Dr. James
Dobson's Focus On The Family are equally formidable
operations and they each have a pretty clear idea
about the other - hence Orland's highlighting of my
point that all the NEA's critics get denounced as
"extremists." An effective and polite summary.
Grade: A
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Robert Holland in
The American Conservative, April 7, 2003
- Peter Brimelow writes: I don't know Robert
Holland personally, but he has written extensively on
education. This review shows evidence of close reading
of the book, catching the input-output question and
also that I don't regard busting the Teacher Trust as
a panacea for K-12 education reforms - just a
prerequisite. Of course, I don't just make my "wishes
regard to their political feasibility" - I explicitly
eschew the subject on the grounds that no-one, least
of all professional politicians, know what is
politically feasible beyond the immediate future. The
same applies to immigration reform! |
| Jonathan Leaf In The Weekly
Standard, March 24 2003
- Peter Brimelow
comments: The playwright Jon Leaf is himself an
expert on the teacher union, having spent five years teaching in New York City, and in
an ideal world I would have collaborated with him on
WORM. But I disagree that my argument isn't novel! I
don't think the legal framework of the Teacher Trust
has been explored before, and I don't think the
input-output analysis is being done anywhere. |
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Peter Brimelow On BookTV Saturday April 12 at 10 a.m.
- Peter Brimelow comments:
This is the third time Book TV has run its version
of my Cato Institute talk, but I keep neglecting to
flag it. Cato has its own video and audio
versions, but
maybe this one has a better camera angle. (Can't do much about the accent!) |
| Mary Walsh in
Human Events,
February
3, 2003 -
Peter Brimelow
comments: Ms. Walsh has an
interesting mind: she notes both qualitative and
quantitative aspects of my analysis. She is also
the only reviewer so far to pick up my point
about the peculiar gender structure of the NEA -
female membership, male (piously liberal)
leadership. More of a summary than a review but,
hey...Grade: A. |
| The O'Reilly Factor, February 26, 2003 -
Peter Brimelow
comments: Because of the Iraq War (sigh) this is the one big media
break we've had, and it's had a dramatic impact on sales. Being interviewed by
Bill O'Reilly is rather like falling into a washing machine. He has an agenda;
fortunately for me, it includes education. Note that O'Reilly makes the common
assumption that "Right To Work" - the right not to join the union - would make a
big difference. In fact, because it can leave the union in exclusive control of
negotiations with the school board, it's significant but not
decisive. Reform of collective bargaining
laws is the key. |
| David Lombino in
Litchfield County Times, March
14, 2003 -
Peter Brimelow comments:
We have a very upscale weekly paper here in
the Connecticut Berkshires, catering to New York
and Boston weekenders, and David Lombino is a
highly educated (Taft, Williams) young man. The
result, ironically, is my personal favorite
review - strictly speaking,interview - to date,
because it neatly summarizes the economic issue
and the fact that the Teacher Trust is driving
the fiscal crisis, with supporting local
evidence. A+ |
| Jay Mathews in Washingtonpost.com, Tuesday February 25, 2003
- Peter Brimelow comments:
This is a generous
review in a paper from which I didn't expect any
quarter. Matthews' conclusion - that he sees no
sign of the unions "inside the classroom" -
indicates the great gulf between financial/
economic journalism and education reporting.
Education reporters want to write about pedagogy -
teaching. Abstract systemic questions mean
nothing to them - that school management cannot
e.g. fire those teachers "inside the classroom,"
nor hire replacements freely. The union has made a
desert and called it school.
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| Tom Sowell's February 27 syndicated column -
Peter Brimelow
comments: A brief, friendly reference, but
reverberating impressively as it appears in papers
across the country. Tom Sowell obviously has a real
following. Hard to believe it's 16 years since I
profiled him
in FORBES! |
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Baltimore Sun, February 23, 2003 -
Peter Brimelow
comments:
Ah, this is a return to the good old
Alien Nation days!
- knee-jerk hysteria at the very mention of the
topic, without any sign that the reviewer has read
the book. Thus John McIntyre says that "How law,
medicine and the church protect incompetents without
the benefit of unions is a subject he does not enter
into..." Apart from its childish, so's-your-father irrelevance
- what possible difference does this make to whether
or not the teacher union is a problem? - McIntyre's
argument is simply wrong. I specifically say in
WORM that the Teacher Trust
is just one of a number of cases where an interest
group, because of some institutional accident, can
temporarily extort rents from society - such as
stockbrokers before negotiated commission rates,
airline pilots before deregulation and...trial
lawyers. (p.76). No wonder he's "assistant managing
editor for the copy desk." - Grade: F
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The
Detroit News, February 23, 2003 -
Peter Brimelow
comments: An effective transposition of
the Teacher Trust problem into Michigan terms. Tom
Bray was a major figure on the Wall Street
Journal editorial page when I spent an
instructive summer there in 1978.
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Bullies in the Schoolyard, by Howard Dickman
- Peter Brimelow comments: I
have to admit this is decent of the Wall
Street Journal, after our various
disagreements. The
writer, Howard Dickman, is an old friend. (This
happens when you get to my age.) No mention of
input-output or legal framework. Sigh.
Grade: A |
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UPI Story on The Worm In the Apple
and the Voucher Question, by Lou Marano
Peter Brimelow comments:
This is a really solid interview, with Checker Finn and
myself, dramatically highlighting the input/output
question, among others. I've heard some whimpering
about my comparison between the (efficient) British
socialist education system 1944-1970s and the (troubled
but low-cost) British socialist National Health System,
because I noted that both were based on triage. But
it's true! Grade: A |
| Publisher's Weekly,
December 23, 2002 - Peter Brimelow comments:
Pedestrian review.
Misses the point that WORM is not an "opinion piece,"
but reporting, with extensive data from official sources
on the government school system's extraordinary
productivity decline and the new drop-out
crisis, besides the more familiar qualitative problems.
Of course, this is all in the dense second chapter,
which had Harper Collins' Tim Duggan twitching
unhappily. Grade: C |
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The Washington Times,
February 02, 2003 - Peter Brimelow
comments: "Devastating and
marvelously readable." Yes, I can live with
that. Of course, Checker Finn is a (neo)conservative
writing for a conservative paper, an
example where the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy has
a little traction i.e. business as usual by the
standards of the Vast Liberal Conspiracy. What I
really like is evidence that Finn had read the
book - this is actually quite rare among book
reviewers - i.e. his noting my detailed reform
recommendations and my argument that the union
has weaknesses. Again, no mention of the
input-output problem of government school system,
and not much of the legal framework, but,
hey...Grade: A
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